Sunday Tribune Article

Staying afloat: Cork City players pictured earlier this season wearing t-shirts calling on clubs to honour contracts. Their troubles could have been avoided if they had more help

An unsatisfactory week in League of Ireland football it may have been, but the domestic league doesn't have a monopoly on the strange and the ridiculous. Across the water, four tiers down from the Premier League, the Football Conference, to give the competition its official title, or the Blue Square Premier as it's currently known, has its own compliance issues going on. For Derry City, read Chester City. The Conference Executive will decide in the next few days whether or not to demote the club from their top division on account of their failure to pay Wrexham monies owed for away ticket sales, or Vauxhall Motors for the purchase of a striker. That gives just a glimpse of the club's problems. Chester already possess an accumulated debt of £4.5million and started the Conference season with the tally of minus 25 points having dropped into administration following their relegation from League Two at the end of last season. This season they are projected to lose £700,000. It is an unholy mess, one that only administrators in Ireland could relate to.

To League of Ireland diehards, those admirably dedicated followers of what has become anti-fashion, any comparison with England Football Conference may come as something of an insult yet the similarities are impossible to ignore. The average League of Ireland attendance in 2008 was 1,796, compared to a Conference figure in the same period of 1,771. This season that average increased to 2,106 in Ireland's Premier Division, with the Conference posting a bump up to exactly 2,000 for the 2009/10 season so far. It's like chalk and, er, chalk.

Interestingly, the jump in average attendance in both leagues can be put down a couple of famous clubs. Shamrock Rovers' move to Tallaght last March is the main reason behind the rise in overall attendance in the League of Ireland Premier Division this year, while AFC Wimbledon, promoted from the Conference North last term, are mostly responsible for upping the average in the Conference so far this season. Then there are the finances, with Rovers and AFC Wimbledon – two clubs run by supporters' trusts – providing the best example of the similarities. According to Hoops' chairman Jonathan Roche recently, his club were set to record an estimated turnover of €1.3million for the season just passed. AFC Wimbledon, showed a turnover in their most recently published accounts in June 2008 of £1.4million. There are other parallels. Wages in both leagues are thought to be broadly similar, while both contain a mix of full-time and part-time clubs in their ranks.

Which is why the FAI might learn a thing or two from the Conference's rules. Nobody is trying to suggest that the running of English non-league football is perfect – indeed you'll find a few clubs under its jurisdiction who think it's a complete farce – but there are one or two practices that would work well in the domestic game. Chief amongst them are the regulations regarding taxes. Every three months clubs in the Conference are required to submit accounts to the league detailing exactly how much they owe to the British revenue, or HMRC as they call themselves across the water. Two months after that submission, the clubs must show the league authorities that they've paid the stated amount, or that they have a payment agreement in place with the revenue. If they don't, a transfer embargo is immediately imposed, with automatic relegation following at the end of the season if all money owed is not paid by then. It's big brother type stuff but it would, for example, have stopped Cork City's problems with the revenue from occurring this season. It would also have ensured that Derry City weren't able to file a different set of contracts with the FAI, as the game's governing body would have been able to figure out from the club's three-monthly tax statement exactly how much money they were paying their players.

There are other sensible rules too. Any club who enters administration over the course of a season must agree a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) with their creditors and pay it in full by the season's end or else they will be relegated. The Conference want unseemly points deductions – the sanction that currently applies in the Football League to any club who enters administration – to become a thing of the past. If you go into administration, you either sort it out by the end of the season or else face the consequences.

The Conference also have a more workable plan on salary caps set to come in at the start of next season. As it stands in the League of Ireland, clubs can only spend 65 per cent of related turnover on player salary costs. The only problem, as we've seen recently with Bohemians, is that the turnover taken into account is that for the current season, which doesn't become concrete until the season ends. The Conference, on the other hand, will impose a 60 per cent cap on wages next season but will measure it against a club's average turnover from the past two seasons, not the projected turnover from the season they are currently in. It is just sensible stuff, like many of the Conference's financial regulations.

Some practices, perhaps, the FAI might consider taking a look at as they try to get the league on a solid footing.