SOCCER: Emmet Maloneexamines how Ireland's most successful club in recent times have suddenly come to be on the brink of extinction

The old Bill Shankly line about football not being a matter of life and death, "it's more important than that", rarely rang more hollow than it did this week as Shelbourne's owner and chief executive, Ollie Byrne, lay battling serious illness and his club struggled for survival.

The club's future remains in the balance with interim chairman Finbarr Flood putting their chances at 50-50, but no one when asked to consider their fate yesterday could do so without acknowledging the sad context in which the situation has unfolded.

The full extent to which the Byrne and Shelbourne had become intertwined has been starkly underlined this week as others sought to untangle the club's affairs in Byrne's absence. Speaking on RTÉ radio on Wednesday evening, Flood was asked about some aspect of the deal to sell Tolka Park to Coneforth Trading, the company owned by Ossie Kilkenny, Ivano Cafolla and Jerry O'Reilly, who agreed back in 2003 a price to purchase the ground whenever Shelbourne move on.

"I don't want to go into it, mainly because I don't understand all of it, I'd need Ollie here to explain it fully," replied the former Guinness chief executive and chairman of the Labour Court.

Byrne may not be universally liked within the game or particularly admired outside of it. Indeed, after years of what might kindly be described as a robust approach to championing Shelbourne's cause, he is now carrying the can for the crisis in which the club to whom he has devoted so much of his adult life to find themselves

Still there is a good deal of residual affection out there for the 65-year-old Dubliner. Many who know him well believe he is being harshly judged for what is happening at Tolka Park, and nobody who has had any dealings with him would make the mistake of taking him for a fool.

"What Ollie has been is ambitious, and it's very hard to knock that in a person, at least until afterwards when they haven't pulled off what they were hoping to," says former Shelbourne chairman Gary Brown.

"The fact is that he wanted to do something that nobody else here was even talking about until he tried it, and it seemed like the club was almost there a couple of times. The problem is that football is one of those sports where people often allow their hearts to rule their heads and Ollie has been as guilty of that as anybody."

On the pitch Shelbourne have been hugely successful in Irish terms over the past decade. The problem is that the club have managed to demonstrate just how little money there is in being successful here. He felt the sale of the ground for development would allow the club to establish a far more effective business model, just as Bohemians now intend to do with the money obtained for Dalymount Park.

Crucially in Shelbourne's case, however, the offer of the site in Finglas to which the club intended to move was withdrawn by the local authority after objections from local residents turned it into an election issue and previously supportive public representatives had a change of heart. Byrne had made the critical error of not indexing the purchase price, and so, while he and his colleagues searched for a new home against a background of soaring property prices, the capital sum that would be realised started to decline significantly in real terms.

At the same time, he was gambling hugely on success in Europe with qualification for the group stages of the Champions League viewed as pretty much the only way really serious revenues could be generated by an Irish club. Expenditure dramatically outstripped income - by 100 per cent, or roughly €1.3 million in recent years - and Byrne set out to make up the shortfall by drawing down funds from Coneforth against the purchase price.

This was roughly €25 million gross or, after a number of significant issues such as capital gains tax and the repayment of capital grants was dealt with, somewhere in region of €17 million.

The difficulty was that, as his relationship with Kilkenny declined, so the advances became harder to obtain, and after that he started to get the money pretty much from wherever he could.

"Ollie had a business model all right," insists former director and current management committee member Colm Murphy. "It may not have been the sort of one they teach in business schools, but there was a logic to what he did which was to invest in the club to achieve something specific and to do it by depreciating the value of the ground.

"The problem was that the outgoings exceeded the income by more than expected, and he then found it impossible to get more money from the person who was buying the ground, so he then borrowed from outside sources to make up the shortfall and those sources were us - everybody he knew.

"But," he asks, "who is standing at the door of Tolka Park threatening to send Shelbourne under? Nobody, because Ollie never borrowed money from anybody without telling them they would get their money back when the ground was sold, and while people are obviously concerned now, really they never stopped believing that."

Not everybody within the game accepts that, and it is often difficult to separate fact from fiction when dealing with the Shelbourne story. What is beyond doubt, however, is that when his back was to the wall Byrne was often unorthodox in his approach, with incidents such as the club's players being paid at one stage in Northern sterling prompting inevitable speculation among rivals.

The players happily lodged the cash and everybody associated with the club dismisses any suggestion of wrongdoing, but those stories, combined with Byrne's often aggressive style and the amount the club spent on achieving success, have combined to limit the amount of sympathy available from some quarters.

The wage bill last year was some €38,000 per week, but Shelbourne consistently had trouble meeting it, prompting anger on the part of those who felt the club were buying titles with money they didn't have.

Around €6.5 million has now been advanced by Kilkenny and his associates, while a further €4 million to €5 million is owed to various creditors, including a significant number of individuals who advanced low, six-figure sums over a period of years often on the basis that Byrne would provide access to tickets for international and big Premiership games while the money was outstanding. In recent months, though, even these sources largely dried up.

Those involved in the playing side of the operation lamented the club's inability to generate larger gates or significant sponsorships, but as Alan Mathews, a former assistant manager at Tolka now in charge of Longford observes, "Ollie ran that club from top to bottom. He achieved standards that other clubs only aspired to, but the infrastructure required to sustain the whole thing was never put in place. People who know Ollie would know that that's his modus operandi. I think Ollie would admit it himself."

Like many who have been involved with the club in recent years Tony McCarthy, a former player and now the first team's physiotherapist, feels that Byrne's main offence is to have reached for the stars and to have come up short. "I think everybody agrees that he tried to raise the bar and he should get credit for that," he says.

That failure, however, has left problems that were described in an understated way by Flood this week as "quite complex".

Still, there is hope around the place, combined with an acceptance that the level of ambition displayed in the immediate future will have to be drastically scaled back.

"The most important thing for supporters now is that we have a club, whether they are challenging for honours, playing outside our ground or whatever else. People are desperate to see them survive," says Niall Fitzmaurice, a leading member of the Shelbourne Supporters Development Group.

The most immediate challenge, though, comes over the next couple of days, as Murphy readily admits. "Obviously if we can't persuade the licensing people that we can pay off the Revenue and the players within a matter of days, and that we can trade through the coming season, then there's no basis for them to give us our licence. But if we can do that then there's no reason for them to change the decision they made last year. But if we do survive," he says, "then the process of rebuilding our credibility while working off a different business plan will begin."

On the Shelbourne website last night the club history page was offline for "updating". After 112 years, we can only hope the time hasn't arrived quite yet to write the final chapter.

No permit, no play: Club's licence could be revoked

Members of the committee that oversees the FAI's club licensing system will meet tomorrow to consider whether, as a result of the financial crisis that has enveloped the club, Shelbourne should be stripped of the licence they were granted late last year.

The meeting has been convened to consider a response by the club to queries put to them in a letter from the committee over the last few days. The questions relate to information supplied by Shelbourne in their licence application last October.

There is a growing sense that the FAI would like a swift end put to an embarrassing period for the game here, and that Shelbourne will face stiff sanctions or even expulsion from the reconstituted League of Ireland, the board of which met for the first time yesterday.

Members of the club's management committee insist, however, that the information supplied last autumn was correct and that the issues raised now by the committee can be properly addressed.

"We have made no secret of the losses being incurred," says Colm Murphy. "The management accounts sent to the licensing people showed a seven-figure loss for the year and debts of 4 million (this figure excludes the 6.5 million advanced by Ossie Kilkenny and his business partners against the price to be paid at a future date for Tolka Park) were indicated."

Finbarr Flood, meanwhile, observed: "We've been asked a number of questions which we will answer. After that it's a matter for the members of the committee to consider.

"All we can do," he added, "is hope that they make a decision quickly and that they allow us to get on with the business of addressing the problems that exist within the club. We're keenly aware that we need to put in place a financial package and work on that is still ongoing."

Ollie Byrne, meanwhile, issued a statement from Beaumont hospital yesterday thanking the many people who had sent him good wishes and stating he believed the club was in good hands. The Dubliner underwent surgery earlier this week and will have further treatment in the weeks ahead.

- Emmet Malone