LEAGUE OF IRELAND NEWS AND PREVIEWS:DESPITE HIS side being just about on course to defend their league title and the draw for Europe just a matter of weeks away, Bohemians manager Pat Fenlon admitted yesterday that improving the club's financial situation will still be the biggest battle up at Dalymount Park during the coming months.
The Dubliners lost around €1 million on the way to winning the double last year, and had amassed debts of some €2.7 million overall by the time the figures were totted up at the end of the campaign.
A huge question mark hangs over the property deal that was supposed to provide cash and a new home for the club, leaving Fenlon uncertain even if he will have the same players available to him when they take the field for the first time in the Champions League in a couple of months.
“I’m not sure if I’ll have the squad I have now next week, and that’s being honest with you,” he said. “If someone comes in and wants to buy our players then there’s not a lot we can do. We need the money. They are the facts, that’s the way it is.
“I don’t think anybody in the league is in a position to say that they can keep the squad they have at the moment.”
Before the start of the season a number of prominent team members, most notably Brian Murphy and Killian Brennan, were linked with moves to British clubs, but, to date, despite persistent expressions of interest, nobody has made a firm offer for anyone.
“We’ve had people at the last four or five home games, maybe three or four teams from England and Scotland coming to watch players, but nobody has made any offers or even spoken to me about them. They just said they were coming and were interested in having a look at certain people.”
The situation, he admits, makes him “despair” sometimes but, he insists, it is a problem everybody in the game needs to address constructively. “People point the finger of blame at players and managers, but I think you have look right across the board at why we aren’t getting people through the turnstiles, why is the sponsorship not better than it is, why is there not more money coming in commercially. I don’t think it’s time to point the finger, it’s time to try to resolve it.
“If you go back to the Rovers game at Dalymount, it was a great advert. If you brought anyone to that game and said, ‘That’s what the League of Ireland is about’, they would go away and say, ‘Jesus, it’s a great product’. That gets forgotten fairly quickly, but that’s really all we want, on a weekly basis, to be able to produce that.”
Club public relations officer Brian Trench admits the situation is serious, but maintains the club is working hard to address the “revenue side”, having already reduced the annual wage bill from €1.95 million to €1.2 million in recent months.
While there are considerable debts, it appears at least that the Revenue Commissioners are not a major creditor and he says the new board hopes to be able to brief the club’s staff and members on how it intends to move forward soon.
