Next week the AIB League Division One begins, preoccupying players and supporters alike for five weekends before it hides behind the skirts of the European Cup once again. For the remainder of the season it plays peek-a-boo with international and provincial fare. It is now firmly ensconced as the third tier in the hierarchy of Irish rugby.

The clubs are starting to display an increasing degree of pragmatism in addressing the future. Sensibly, the Division One clubs, supported by the IRFU, agreed a salary cap of £50,000 per firstteam squad, thereby confronting the furtive cheque-book fumblings and brown paper bag culture that enticed the young and not-so-young players to jump clubs.

Of course, the clubs must police the new code. The cost to a club of fielding a team in the upper echelons of the league is about £400,000, as shown in the accompanying table. The figures reflect the income and expenditure for the unnamed club during the 1999-2000 season: some clubs in Division One will spend more, some less, but few will manage to juggle the balance sheet as adeptly, albeit incurring a loss.

Sponsorship, incorporating a team's main sponsor, pitchside hoardings, prematch lunches and individual match sponsorship - the latter usually costs about £2,000 for a would-be sponsor - contributes the lion's share of income; in the case of the club shown, £130,000.

In analysing the rest of the money coming into the club, it is apparent that the members of a respective club, coaxed by committees, are asked to beg, plead and borrow and are also reliant on the staple diet of fundraising mainstays, like corporate golf outings, race nights and poker nights. The bar profits are the single biggest earner - £75,000 - and therefore a club must entice people through the turnstiles.

The IRFU subvention to clubs has increased this year to £30,000, recognition of the increased costs of travelling in a 16-team division.

Pre-match lunches are another valuable source of income, with anything between £30 and £60 a head being demanded of the patrons. The disparity between the haves and have-nots is huge: in one Division Two club they would sell about five or six tables at £30 a head, compared to a Division One club that would charge £50 a head and might have 35 to 50 tables.

In the case below, the club had overheads of £150,000 to cover light, heat, upkeep of premises and grounds and wages, while the rugby budget is £250,000. That would include the cost of player insurance (£30,000), payment to coaches (£50,000), physiotherapy fees (£20,000), playing kit (£8,000), overnight expenses travelling to a match (£10,000) and the supply of accommodation and transport for foreign or non-local players.

The thorny issue of payment of players is perhaps the area that will undergo the biggest change in years to come. Clubs will be increasingly reluctant to pay players who may be available to them for only a half a dozen games a season. Provincial and international commitments take precedence, and, as the IRFU outlined recently, the Irish team management will have the licence to withdraw a player from a club game where necessary.

If the clubs are going to be cherry-picked of their young talent, then they deserve a more substantial recompense. Whether that means a sliding scale of payments to a club for players who win provincial or international contracts, or sizeable prizemoney for winning the league (£150,000), there should be serious financial reward for clubs who foster and develop young talent.

The clubs are the root of the game, and they must not be left to wither, the union dazzled by the beauty of the flower.