SOCCER AIRTRICITY LEAGUE PREVIEW:  EMMET MALONEon the air of less than high anticipation that greets the start of a new season, with financial survival the chief ambition for many .

IT SAYS a good deal about the state in which the League of Ireland finds itself at the start of its 2010 season that few in the game here can bring themselves to hope for much more between now and the end of November than the avoidance of further financial humiliation.

Though he consistently contends things would be worse if the FAI had not taken control of the competition a few years back, even chief executive John Delaney said during the close season he would settle for a campaign without calamity of the sort thrown up at Derry or Cork City last year.

Even last night, however, the league’s manager, Fran Gavin, admitted he could not be “confident” all of the clubs would get through the coming year without serious difficulty. And despite dramatic declines in the earnings of players – routinely singled out in recent years as the root cause of the league’s problems – almost nobody expects all clubs to pay all their wages on all scheduled pay days. Estimates on when that last happened differ, but there’s broad agreement it’s been at least a couple of decades.

Delaney, who is well paid himself for running the whole show and is, unsurprisingly, relentlessly upbeat about the situation, insists the league, like its parent association, is the victim of a media determined to view the glass as half-empty.

“There are a lot of positives in the league,” he said last week as Airtricity was unveiled as the new title sponsor. “The only negatives pertain to how certain individuals have run certain clubs.”

The biggest problem, he insists, is the reluctance or inability of many clubs to embrace the “cultural change” which the association has sought to promote over the last couple of years.

Critics might argue had the association managed that change a little better at least some of the mayhem of the past couple of seasons would have been avoided.

As the wider economic climate deteriorated, though, clubs have struggled to cope and the FAI, having been repeatedly embarrassed by their inability to prevent problems has instead taken to punishing miscreants with increasing severity.

The upshot is that, just a few short years after leading officials in the game here were hailing the growing capacity of the bigger clubs to provide a viable alternative to a career in Britain, pay levels have slumped even at some pretty prominent clubs and players are increasingly turning to social welfare to supplement meagre incomes.

“It is a critical year,” insists PFAI general secretary Stephen McGuinness. “I’d like to think that with everything that has happened and with the money that’s being paid at this stage, we can get through this year without a major problem.

“Deep down, I think a lot of the lads knew the basis for what they were getting a couple of years ago wasn’t really there but the feeling now is that it’s absolutely doable, it has to be. I think if things go wrong now, the attitude is going to be a lot less forgiving.”

One of his members, Bohemians skipper Owen Heary prefers, like most players, to concentrate on the football, but is wary that all of the sacrifices made by his colleagues – many of whom have seen their income drop by between half and three quarters over the past three seasons, with others simply unable to find work – will count for nothing if the association and clubs don’t start to halt the slide.

“We all talked to the FAI a couple of years back and they said there was a three-year plan to stop this sort of thing happening,” he says. “Well, here we are in year three, so hopefully they’ll get it right.

“All of the players who were making mad money have taken big cuts at this stage so there’s really no excuse for it happening again. From this point on, any club that doesn’t pay its players should be severely punished.”

Though Heary has not been unaffected by the cutbacks, he remains in a relatively comfortable position at Bohemians, whose continuing success has helped to generate significant revenue. Sporting Fingal are now reckoned to be the league’s only other properly full-time club, although Shamrock Rovers aren’t far off it with players there having very little scope to take other employment.

Elsewhere, it’s a very mixed bag but 40-week contracts providing weekly incomes of between €300 and €500 are increasingly the norm which, McGuinness argues, is not much of a basis for turning down alternative career opportunities.

“We’re going from one extreme to the other,” says Dermot Keely, the Shelbourne manager who was there for the start of that club’s dramatic expansion but who consistently argued the league could not sustain widespread full-time football.

The likes of Bohemians, Shamrock Rovers and Sporting Fingal do stand a chance of performing well this year. Most will be more preoccupied with their finances than their football.