EMMET MALONE ON SOCCER: This week may turn out to be a make-or-break one for an ailing domestic game

THE REST of the country might just feel they have bigger fish to fry when Brian Lenihan stands up in the Dáil to deliver his first budget speech this afternoon, but those involved with League of Ireland clubs will await the detail of how the Minister for Finance intends to deal with the dramatic downturn in the country's economic circumstances with a particular sense of anxiety.

It is, as it happens, a big week for the club game here. Drogheda United are expected to enter examinership, Cork City should emerge from it and Bohemians will find out on Friday whether they have to renegotiate the terms of their deal with the developer, Liam Carroll, for the purchase of Dalymount Park and the club's relocation to a greenfield site out by the airport.

In addition, work on Finn Harps' new stadium began yesterday at Stranorlar, Shamrock Rovers have started selling season tickets for their first campaign in Tallaght and Limerick 37 will hold a hugely important fund-raiser with Giovanni Trapattoni tomorrow evening at the Castletroy Park Hotel.

The budget, though, will almost certainly bring bad news for an already troubled league, with a likely shift in resources away from sport generally and, in particular, the sort of capital development funding that many clubs have benefited from in recent years and quite a few others would still have been hoping to make some use of.

It's not quite clear of how much relevance the situation will be to Drogheda, where a couple of the directors still want to take a third crack at implementing the business model they developed to ensure the long-term prosperity of the club, even as a lack of cash has forced them to tell players they can't expect to be paid over the coming weeks.

United are now one of eight clubs experiencing serious difficulties paying squad members while several others are said to battling hard to avoid their financial difficulties spilling out into the public arena.

League and FAI officials insist that 13 of the 22 clubs will make a profit this year but the claim is widely ridiculed in private by those who actually run the clubs. Essentially, it is generally believed that none will come anywhere near to generating a real surplus on their normal footballing activities.

Some manage to come up with enough revenue from off-the-field operations to hover around the break-even mark but in many cases the deficit incurred is simply stumped up by one or more "investors" with their contributions counted as income. Once the sum donated is more than the operating loss for the period in question then, hey presto, the club is declared to be one of those turning a profit.

The association's line has consistently been that things would have been much, much worse had the clubs been left to their own devices but just now, it's a little hard to tell quite how.

The substantial progress that has been made both on and off the pitch over the last few years has been widely acknowledged (not least in these pages) but with passing crisis it becomes more apparent that those behind them have yet to come up with a sustainable formula for paying the cost.

Certainly, nobody appears to be believe that relying on enough people deciding the product is worth paying to see is going to do the trick.

Sponsorship revenues - which were never high enough in the first place - are set to come under severe pressure due to the banking sector crisis and all the wider troubles it has given rise to, with one club official suggesting last week that football clubs tend to come behind charities in the eyes of companies with a few spare quid to spare. Even the models built in one way or another around property development are also looking just a little shaky at this stage.

In Drogheda's case the businessmen who have backed the club over the last few years are said to have put around €12 million into building it up on the field while pursuing the new stadium scheme.

In that instance, their repeated inability to secure planning proved the major stumbling block and notwithstanding the league, cup and Setanta Cup success enjoyed over the last few years, the entire enterprise may yet, if the situation cannot be rescued, go down as the most costly failure in the history of the domestic game.

Bohemians, meanwhile, would be left in a terribly vulnerable position if the High Court case concerning a tiny piece of the Dalymount Park site goes against them.

At the very least, the club would have to renegotiate the value of the deal at a time when such things are best avoided while the worst case scenario would involve the deal collapsing and the newly-crowned league champions left to scramble around for a new business plan.

Across the city, the fate of St Patrick's Athletic lies entirely in the hands of Garrett Kelleher, a property developer whose gigantic Chicago Spire project has been mothballed because of the current downturn.

The losses at Richmond Park may not exactly be crippling by Kelleher's standards but they must still be something of an irritant that he could rather do without at this stage.

The Dubliner bought the club at a time when money was more easily come by and half a dozen more of the country's leading outfits appeared to have the collective backing required to move forward together most likely, it seemed, towards the common goal of an all Ireland league.

Now, Cork City and Drogheda United have taken significant jolts, Bohemians may be about to take one too, Galway United have been obliged to downsize their ambitions, Sligo, Harps and Cobh are amongst the others struggling while Derry City narrowly, and perhaps temporarily, staved off the need for cut backs by selling Pat McCourt to Celtic in a deal that is eventually expected to generate around €500,000.

Somehow, all of the clubs affected will be expected to get things sufficiently in order by the end of November to obtain licences for next year.

In the circumstances, the refusal of the Abbotstown hierarchy to engage a little more seriously with those behind the all Ireland plan looks more ill-advised than ever, their supposed victory over Fintan Drury a good deal more pyrrhic with each passing day.