ONE of the Northern Ireland Football League’s mission statements for the new season is tightening up on financial house-keeping and they haven't ruled out the prospect of introducing points deductions should clubs not pay their taxes on time.
The new season kicks off with the Charity Shield showdown between league champions Linfield and Irish Cup winners Crusaders on Saturday August 6, and NIFL chief Gerard Lawlor wants to see more growth in the local game.
On the issue of financial housekeeping, NIFL officials have discovered a “loophole” in how some clubs occasionally delay paying tax to HMRC.
Going forward, clubs will be asked to pay HMRC within a 56-day period or run the risk of losing league points.
“Clubs in the past have used HMRC as a bank, which is not the right way of doing things,” said Lawlor.
“It’s unfair on a club that go out and pay their HMRC religiously every month for a 12-month period.
“Then someone maybe says in January that 'we need to sign a striker, we need to do a wee bit more here [and] we’re not going to pay HMRC for four or five months and we’ll use that money to try and qualify for Europe.’”
However, there was plenty of praise for NIFL clubs during yesterday’s press briefing ahead of the new season, but Lawlor is keen to see rising standards across the board, and part of their approach would be staging more games on Sundays.
“Year on year the league has to grow, it has to be better, we can’t rest on our laurels from last year,” he said.
“We have to make the league more attractive, better and more exciting and more accessible to a wider audience and that’s what we’re trying to do through a number of different platforms.
“If all the games are on a Saturday you’ll go to one game. If there are matches on Friday, Saturday and Sunday you might go to two out of three games across the weekend.
“So many people work on Saturdays now and we’re competing with a lot of other attractions, so we have to give people football whenever they want it. The large proportion of people still want football at three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, but not everybody does, so we have to cater for that other audience too.”
