ON SOCCER:Financial pressures from within and from across the water mean clubs must dig deeper and deeper into their reserves to pay the best players, writes Emmet Malone.

AS THE employers dig their heels in at the national partnership talks there are signs the leading League of Ireland clubs are beginning to wonder what might be done about their soaring wage bills.

Whether they can actually do anything about them, though, remains to be seen. There has been some talk that the likes of Cork City, St Patrick's Athletic, Bohemians and Drogheda United might hammer out an agreement to cap their players' wages.

It wouldn't be the first time such a cap was attempted here, but on the one occasion a deal was apparently struck it was only hours before word circulated it had been breached.

The legality of such a proposal seems as questionable now as its feasibility. Officials at several of the big clubs concede privately they doubt it could work.

What they are also agreed upon, however, is the market has gone haywire these last few years, when the salaries of the best players in the league have more than doubled. Who you reckon started the upward spiral depends on the date you use as your starting point.

Certainly Shelbourne played their part when Ollie Byrne was intent on cracking Europe in a major way.

It's roughly a decade since club officials at Tolka Park confirmed the annual gate receipts amounted to around €150,000 while wages were about eight times that. It's unlikely the ratio got much better in the following years.

The club subsequently sought to gather a disproportionate number of the league's best players in one place so as to build a squad capable of challenging on several fronts, and they occasionally caused consternation with the money they were prepared to pay.

Still, even in the year or so before things went off the rails, €60,000 was considered big money for a player to be earning.

And it was, of course, in terms of the revenue being generated. But from a player's point of view it hardly represented a lottery win, especially when you could still get a high proportion of the figure while playing full-time and holding down another job - one with better security and longer-term prospects for advancement.

When the switch to full-time was made by the leading clubs, Drogheda United probably became the biggest drivers of wage inflation, Paul Doolin initially having difficulty persuading the best players to join a club with no history of success.

As a result, a number of players at the time considered somewhat second-tier were lured with substantial packages that shifted the bar upwards and allowed more highly regarded players to use United's wage structure as a basis for seeking more money at other clubs.

It was a slightly odd but rather predictable take on the old trade union issue of differentials, though some of the sums here might baffle participants on both sides of the table at the national pay talks.

By now the competition for the best locally based players appears to be out of control.

St Patrick's Athletic are widely believed to have offered just over €4,000 a week - a sum roughly equivalent to the club's gate receipts for last season - to Joe Gamble, who turned the offer down, preferring to accept a somewhat smaller offer to stay at Cork City.

Gamble's new deal at City will presumably make him the club's best-paid player - at least for a while - but a number of others at the club are believed to be on €100,000 or significantly more a year - a sizeable portion of some pay packets coming in the form of performance-related bonuses.

Elsewhere, the trend has been precisely the same. Ken Oman was released by Bohemians at the end of the 2005 season and is said to have returned on three times as much money after two good years with Derry City.

In part, such an increase might be expected given his greatly enhanced stature but the going rate had also increased in the interim.

Jason Gavin, meanwhile, is reckoned to have secured a deal in the same ballpark as Michael Keane's when he moved to Richmond Park recently.

Gavin is regarded as one of the league's best centre backs, but the scale of the risk to the club when such monies are involved was highlighted only last Friday when a disputes panel found Keane had been unfairly dismissed by St Patrick's over what they saw as his persistent lack of fitness. The player, who was on more than €3,000 a week, is said to be seeking €100,000 in compensation.

Football, of course, is a particularly virulent example of a free market, and players cannot be blamed for looking to maximise their income over short careers.

What's more, wages here are still so comparatively low that interest in a player from a major British club makes it utterly impossible to keep him.

At present, a good top-flight player - that's someone not quite seen as part of the elite but nevertheless a cut above the average - might expect to earn about €80,000 gross (though tax compliance has dramatically improved because of a variety of factors over the last few years, most deals are actually still talked about within the game in terms of net pay).

That's roughly what Paddy McCourt is said to have been on at Derry City when he left for Celtic during the summer.

His contract was in its last year and City were keen that he sign what would presumably have been a much improved one, but the Scots are believed to have offered him around 10 times as much.

Even if he doesn't make the breakthrough at the Glasgow giants that's an impossible opportunity to turn down, and it demonstrates how difficult it will be for Irish clubs to retain their best players as standards improves here.

If it really is to keep on improving, though, clubs have to bring in better players from outside rather than continuing to compete for the best locally based or returning Irish ones.

A glance at the CVs of the those arriving in the run-up to the transfer deadline would not, however, inspire confidence that they will all prove better than what is here already.

Nor, given the nature of the game and their track records, would you be confident the clubs might somehow get together and sort the situation out among themselves.