SFA in danger of alienating O’Neill

MICHAEL O’NEILL is surprised by the way the SFA have set about recruiting him as Scotland manager. And he isn’t the only one. Chief executive Stewart Regan hasn’t issued any official public statements saying the Northern Ireland boss is the man he wants. He didn’t have to. An SFA sub-committee came up with some names to replace Gordon Strachan and the suspicion is O’Neill was first, second and third on the list. The problem is that the former Hibs and Dundee United winger is already in a job with a lengthy, lucrative contract. And, contrary to reports, the SFA have not been granted permission to start talks. To get that, they need to agree to meet the £500,000 release figure in O’Neill’s contract. And they haven’t done it yet. If or when they do, they then have to offer him more than his current salary of £500k a year to make it worth his while. Hiring O’Neill, then, could cost Scotland’s governing body a sum of around £1.1million in year one. Or to put it another way, three times what it might cost to hire Alex McLeish. Unsurprisingly, not everyone within the SFA thinks this offers the best value for money. Or, for that matter, that sticking all their eggs in one basket in the search for a new manager was an especially wise negotiating stance. The governing body might have thought they could trim a few quid off O’Neill’s compensation bill. But the Irish FA aren’t having it. The figure of £500,000 is there in black and white. And while a national association have to go through the proper channels, you’d like to think they had some inkling of what the compensation figure might be before making a call to the IFA. Listen, this may all be part of some wily negotiating ploy. Planting a seed of doubt in O’Neill’s mind to make sure he doesn’t get any ideas about asking for silly money. But yesterday’s interview on Irish radio offered the first hint of something else. A hint that, if this is the way the SFA set about things, he might feel better staying where he is.