PLAYERS IN CRISIS:AS HE wandered about the AUL in Clonshaugh yesterday, Professional Footballers' Association of Ireland general secretary Stephen McGuinness joked the organisation had put together a squad well capable of getting itself out of the first division than holding its own in the Premier.

Put the out-of-work players who turned up for their union’s first pre-season run-out in the hands of one of the league’s more exuberant managers and the claims made on their behalf might well be a good deal grander than that.

The place was littered with former league winners availing of the opportunity to stay fit and do a bit of ball work while waiting for their phone to ring.

All are among the 375 or so professional footballers who found themselves out of contract at the end of last season and while a handful are weighing up offers from clubs, a growing number are becoming concerned their reputations appear to count for rather little as clubs seek to get their wage bills back into something like the same stratosphere as their revenues for 2010.

Now 32, Neale Fenn has won championship medals in three of the last five seasons but the former Tottenham striker looks a little bewildered how he could get to this stage of pre-season for the new campaign without receiving so much as an inquiry from a manager.

“I haven’t had a phone call at all,” he says. “It has surprised me that I didn’t even get the odd ‘what’s happening?’ call to check on what I’m doing.

“To be honest,” he admits, “I haven’t had it as bad as a lot of the other lads over the last few years because when I was at Cork I got paid every week while at Bohemians there were pay cuts but basically the money you agreed on was always there for you.

“But it’s difficult now. I want to stay in Ireland and I want to carry on playing, I could just pack it in and claim back my tax. But I think the clubs are in a position where they’re offering a lot of players contracts and if they say no they’re asking ‘Well, where are you going to go?’”

Liam Burns, a team-mate during the title-winning season of 2008, recently turned down a new deal with Dundalk that represented, he reckons, a cut of around 60 per cent on last year’s money. He’s anxious to get sorted but insists taking anything like what’s been offered to him so far would mean a return to part-time football and the need to get another job. “Clubs are looking to pay money now for full-time football,” he claims, “that you just can’t live on. You’re getting part-time money while being expected to make a full-time commitment to the club.

“A couple of years ago a good Premier Division player could earn upwards of €80,000 with the very best getting contracts worth anything up to three times that by playing the leading clubs off against each other. Now, it’s a fraction of that.

“Even three or four years ago there was great money going to players,” acknowledges Richie Baker, “stupid money, you’d have to say, but that’s not the players’ fault. It was what the clubs were prepared to pay.”

Baker, who won five titles with Shelbourne and Drogheda United, is the first to admit he did well out of the game but now, at 29, he is taken aback to find himself in a market where good players are being offered “a couple of hundred quid to play part-time”.

“If you take that then you have to find another job to support your family and if you try to stay full-time then managers have a gun to your head.”

Like many others in the game, the Dubliner is now trying to set up his own business so as to generate an income while retaining the flexibility required to continue playing.

His anger at the way players have repeatedly found themselves on the receiving end of the clubs’ financial shortcomings is pretty obvious as he commends those who have moved to England recently, even to the lower leagues, for getting out of the game here.

“It’s a disgrace when you’re owed three months money and then you get offered 20 per cent or something of the money. I’ve no time for the FAI at this stage because it keeps on happening. When I was at Drogheda I was at a meeting where John Delaney promised us it would never happen again but there you are a year later and there are all the problems at Derry, it’s always the same.”

In the meantime, the union-sponsored training, along with a few friendly games for the benefit of managers and scouts from as far afield as Hungary and Cyprus, will continue for the next eight weeks near the airport where the planes overhead are a constant reminder of the hard choices facing those who fail to impress.

A possible team drawn from just some of those taking part in the PFAI training camp at the AUL: Pat Jennings (ex-Derry City); John Ryan (ex-Drogheda United); Jason Gavin (ex-St Patrick’s Athletic); Liam Burns (ex-Dundalk), Dave Rogers (ex-Shelbourne); Richie Baker (ex-Shelbourne); Shane Robinson (ex-Shamrock Rovers); Gareth O’Connor (ex-St Patrick’s Athletic); Bobby Ryan (ex-Bohemians); Neale Fenn (ex-Bohemians), Anto Flood (ex-Shelbourne).