Top league stars among 135 listed online

PLAYERS FOR SALE:THE LATEST edition of Irish football's great annual "Come and get me" plea went online yesterday when the players union posted a list of 135 players now out of work since the League of Ireland season ended.

The list is littered with former championship medal winners and even includes three of this season’s Shamrock Rovers squad, with Seán O’Connor, Stephen Bradley and Robert Bayly officially wanting it known they are available for work.

Among the other prominent players on the list are Eamon Zayed of Sporting Fingal, who recently received a first international call-up from Libya, twice-capped striker Jason Byrne, who played this season with Bohemians, and Liam Burns of Dundalk, who spoke at the start of the year about being released by the same club 12 months ago when he sought a contract elsewhere before agreeing to return to Oriel Park on drastically reduced terms.

Many may end up following suit this time around for it has become fairly standard practice for clubs to now employ players only until the end of the season and then seek to put together a squad again as close as possible to the start of the next campaign, so as to keep costs to a minimum.

Players who played the previous year are often amongst the first to be approached but there are no guarantees and PFAI general secretary Stephen McGuinness says 91 per cent of the league’s players have found themselves out of contract over the past couple of weeks.

“I’d say about half the players affected are on the list,” he says. “Some of the others will simply not want to be included, in some instances because they don’t want to be named, and some might be talking to their clubs and so they’ll be reluctant to p*** off the managers they are dealing with.”

Most, he says, get fixed up with clubs in the end – although the vast majority will have to wait until the new year – but some will drift out of professional football and a portion, McGuinness reckons, will eventually decide to call it a day and retire in order to claim back their sporting tax relief.

Talks between the board of Bohemians and PFAI members at the club are continuing, meanwhile, with McGuinness describing the exchanges so far as “constructive”.

The club is attempting to agree terms with the majority of its squad to terminate their contracts as part of its effort to dramatically reduce costs for next year.

In recent weeks just four players – three of them young and considered potentially saleable – and manager Pat Fenlon have been paid and having exchanged proposals with the rest, the club has until Friday week to strike deals with them if the conditions of licencing are going to be met.

The club, meanwhile, says it will make the required payment to the Revenue Commissioners by Friday in order to avoid a dramatic escalation of its problems.

A meeting for supporters was held in Phibsborough last night, following on from one attended by members last week but club spokesman Brian Trench says, “the message has got through over the last few days”, with “people and money starting to come through the door at Dalymount Park”.

All in all, the club owes around €5 million but according to Trench, the money that has been raised so far, much of it in the form of small donations from lifelong fans, “is enough to enable us to meet our most pressing obligations”.