Wages are low and contracts short, but professional game is on firmer footing

For the players, the SSE Airtricity League close season is like a giant game of musical chairs, and with the organisers about to press play again, a fortunate few stragglers have been finding places to settle in over the past few days.

The financial constraints within which clubs here operate continue to result in a high rate of turnover, with some in or around Dublin, where movement is easiest, changing around half of their squads. Personalising your replica shirt is, in other words, a risky business.

The business side of the league itself continues to stabilise after the chaos that followed the wider economic crash. The Professional Footballers’ Association of Ireland (PFAI) general secretary, Stephen McGuinness, remembers 90 per cent of all players failing to be paid on time at least once over the course of a particular campaign a few years back.

“Last year we had a bit of a problem at Bray, but we got that sorted,” he says now.

Bray’s budget

With new owners on board, Bray’s budget this year will be slightly up on last, but it remains modest. Wanderers boss

Alan Mathews

has about an eighth of the money now that he did when he was in charge of Cork City, while, at Drogheda, the weekly wage bill is rumoured to be less than a tenth of what it was when they were winning trophies on the back of a property deal that didn’t come off.

“These things are cyclical,” says Mathews, “and I think investment will come back into the league. We’re seeing some signs of it already, but there are certainly lessons to be learned; you’d like to think that next time we have money to spend, that more of it will go on training facilities, something more permanent than wages.”

McGuinness, whose job is to represent the interests of the league’s professional players, broadly agrees. The best paid could earn €3,500 a week a few seasons ago, whereas the corresponding figure now is around €1,000 a week for the 40 weeks that contracts at the bigger clubs now run for.

The larger sums simply weren’t sustainable, McGuinness says, and his members are generally better off if clubs are on sufficiently solid financial ground to be capable of delivering whatever they promise to their employees.

“I think the general feeling now is that things are very good,” he says. “And players, who feel that they have been through this period of pain, are now looking to clubs for something back.”

Wages at the top, he says, are edging up again, while those closer to the bottom are stable. It is in the middle, though, that there is no real sign of a recovery. “I think if you’re with one of the four of five clubs who think of themselves as being title contenders, then you’re probably doing fairly okay again, but there’s a big, big drop after that. We have a lot of lads who were earning €500 or €600 a few seasons ago who are getting a third of that now, with maybe the odd bonus clause thrown in. Quite a few players simply don’t feel it’s worth it and are dropping out of the league. It’s one of the reasons we have the lowest average age of any league in Europe.”

Better facilities

Even McGuinness, though, feels that better facilities need to be a priority, with clubs able to generate revenue from player sales if they are developing young talent. “If you look at somewhere like

Sligo Rovers

and the set up they have at the Showgrounds now, you’d have to say that any aspiring professional would look at that and thinkthat’s a really proper football club,” he says.

At Sligo, Owen Heary is targeting a return to the top four with a budget that is rumoured to be down by almost a third.

“It’s less than it was, all right,” he says, “but that’s because we didn’t qualify for Europe, so we’ve looked to give players who are hungry an opportunity we hope they’ll grab.”

It’s a big ask. League positions have a habit of reflecting club spending pretty closely by the end of a campaign, so cutting budgets is not usually conducive to climbing the table.

That’s not McGuinness’s problem though. He’s concerned with clubs cutting their coat according to their cloth and treating their players fairly. Much may have been achieved on the first count, but with no minimum wage in the professional game and not even all of preseason paid, there is much left to achieve on the second.