Treaty United get their pre-season campaign underway this week

TREATY United will get their pre-season fixtures underway this week.

Treaty face Galway United in the Ennis County Grounds on Friday night at 7pm, before taking on Temple United in the Munster senior Cup a week later.

Treaty United finished in seventh place in the SSE Airtricity League First Division on 44 points last season. Treaty Utd manager Tommy Barrett is hoping Treaty can finish as high as possible this season.

“The target is always to finish as high as possible. That’s essentially it and that’s where we are at as a club,” Barrett said.

“Expectations probably have gone up, people expect you to make the play-offs because we did the first two years. It’s never easy with a new team entering the league. We overachieved and now the expectations are gone through the roof which I think is a good thing. We expect to be challenging in or around the play-offs and if we can get to the play-offs, happy days.”

Treaty boss Barrett feels it will be difficult for his side to compete with the bigger budgets of some of the teams in the First Division.

The Limerick-based club is currently preparing for the start of the SSE Airtricity League of Ireland First Division season.

Manager Barrett said:“It's a difficult season, we have increased the budget. It's really difficult to compete with what other teams are handing out. There's a lot of full-time money floating around in a part-time league which is difficult for us. This time of the year is probably the most difficult.

“I didn't expect it to be as difficult if I'm honest about it. The money out there for a small pool of players is gone through the roof. It's a bit of worry overall for the league, for a part-time league. I think with money out there you might as well go full time and bite the bullet. This is the hardest part of recruitment.”

Barrett is pleased to re-sign the majority of players that he had last season.

“We signed back a lot of lads that we wanted to sign back. We missed out on a couple, Thomas Considine is gone to Bray and obviously Stephen Christopher, Ben O'Riordan and Enda Curran are not playing this year due to various reasons. Ben is emigrating, Stevie is moving back home and Enda has retired.”

“They’re good honest hard-working lads and that’s the most important thing in this league. There’s some very good young players in that group as well. We’re hoping to develop them further.”

Barrett hopes to finalise his squad over the next few weeks ahead of the new season.

“I'm still looking for a couple of players. I've a few lads on trial next week, we've few foreign internationals on trial in the next couple weeks. We'll look at that market and see how we go,” said the Treaty United manager.