Emmet Malone's column: In a league where even official attendance figures are a closely guarded secret it may be hard to quantify the extent of the benefits that have been experienced by clubs here since the earlier start to the season.

What the July kick-off has also done, however, is to make it more difficult than ever to fathom just how miserably our clubs performed in Europe this year.

Both Dundalk and Shamrock Rovers will presumably have been glad just to get last week's UEFA Cup second leg games out of the way after a couple of weeks in which the grim possibility of even worse defeats hung over them.

Each can point to specific factors that go some way towards mitigating the extent of their defeats by Varteks of Croatia and Djugardens of Sweden.

Dundalk lost experienced players like Stephen McGuinness, James Keddy and David Crawley after being relegated last season, while Liam Buckley at least would argue that his time at Rovers so far has been spent introducing a new system and a number of new players to a team whose late collapse last season cost their then manager Damien Richardson his job.

The fact is, though, that the league was unfortunate that two of its weaker teams from last year ended up representing it in this year's UEFA Cup. In Dundalk's case, the evidence is clear enough for, while they qualified by winning the cup, the side was, even before the departure of those first-team regulars, not good enough to avoid relegation.

With Rovers, things may have been less black and white, but there was always a suspicion that they would struggle.

The fact that they won just five of their last 15 league games and crashed, fairly spectacularly, out of the cup at the semi-final stage to Dundalk last season, gives a fairly good picture of the sort of turnaround that would have been necessary if they were to do well against a talented Djugardens.

Supporters of somebody like Bohemians could argue that, with many more full-time players, recent European experience and a league run-in that involved just one defeat in 11 games, they would have been much better equipped for the challenge.

Had St Patrick's not been deducted 15 points as a result of their problems with player registrations, then Ireland's entry in the various European competitions would have had a much healthier look about it.

Pat Dolan's side would have gone into the Champions league qualifiers, Shelbourne the UEFA Cup and Rovers the Intertoto Cup.

The Inchicore club may have been the authors of their own misfortune last season, but the fact remains that they were the best team in the league, a league that can ill afford to be putting out its second best in the premier European competition.

As it turned out, easily the greatest blow to the league's standing over the past few months was Shelbourne's humiliating failure to beat Hibernians in the first round of the Champions League - the first time a club from this country has failed to get past one from Malta.

And, outside of Tolka Park, just about everybody agrees that St Patrick's would have progressed from that tie.

Assuming they had then that, combined with even the second-leg draw that the Maltese managed against Boavista in the next round, would have been enough to maintain Ireland's slight but nevertheless real progress on the UEFA ranking list in recent years.

It is that progress that resulted in Shelbourne being drawn against a side like Hibernians in the first place and, though this season's champions will benefit from it too, it will probably evaporate after that unless there is a considerable improvement in the results again.

If the order in which the clubs entered the various competitions counted against them subsequently, then the shift in season should have been of considerable benefit.

After years of bemoaning the fact that the league's clubs were having to play European games before they were fully fit, there appeared to be no noticeable improvement this time.

By the end of their first game against Djugardens, the Rovers players looked exhausted, while Shelbourne got caught by the Maltese in the last minute of a game they needed only to draw.

In fact, the only team to perform relatively well, St Patrick's Athletic, managed to beat Croatia's Rijeka without the benefit of having played any competitive football at all.

And with only those two games under their belts, Dolan's players went on to draw 3-3 over two legs with Gent, a side with 10 times the Dublin club's cash turnover.

Sadly, the results, as they were in the Intertoto, count for nothing in terms of improving the league's current standing or future prospects.

Instead, there will be more pressure than ever on next year's representatives in the main competitions to make amends for the damage done this time around and, in all probability, less confidence amongst a sceptical public in their ability to pull it off.