Ciarán Murphy: The uncomfortable truth is people don’t want more Gaelic football games

According to a straw poll in the Irish Examiner last week , 87 per cent of the county board delegates at last weekend’s Central Council meeting wanted the structure of the All-Ireland senior football championship to be changed for 2025. But there will be no change to the championship next year. This doesn’t appear to be a shining example of democracy in action, but I have a degree of sympathy for the GAA, on this particular topic.
As reported by Seán Moran in this paper on Wednesday, this will be a seismic few months in football. The rule changes being proposed have the potential to radically alter the game. If the GAA wanted to stick to their guns and say we’d give the current calendar a three-year trial period, in the midst of the on-field upheaval, I would be prepared to give them a little bit of slack.
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Another way of looking at it is that a fresh new set of playing rules, allied to a new competition structure that would give us more do-or-die championship games, would give both changes the maximum opportunity to impress. But maybe walking before we can run is prudent. If Gaelic football is to be saved, maybe best to do the saving across two summers – really stretch this redemption arc for all its worth.
But change is certainly coming, and counties are being proactive in how they prepare for it. The Galway county board put out a proposal last week that grabbed my attention for a number of reasons, but primarily for the simple reason that it suggested something that not many sporting bodies do – we should play fewer games.
The urge is always to add more games, to always try to convince yourself that the market is out there and always growing. The uncomfortable truth for Gaelic football over the last few years is that the market has spoken, and people do not want more games.
There quite simply isn’t a tradition or a desire for people to traipse around the country 20 times a season to watch an intercounty team. “We’ll watch this one on telly, and we’ll go to the next one” isn’t half as catchy as “nothing beats being there”, but it’s far closer to the truth of how the vast majority of GAA people feel about attending intercounty games. This is perhaps painful to read, but that’s the reality.
Many times over the course of the last few years, I’ve been tempted to ask a question not posed half enough – how many games a season do you think your county’s Gaelic football team should play? From what I can tell, that’s the question the Galway county board asked themselves, and their solutions flowed from that one question.
The exact ins and outs of Galway’s plan are, in many ways, immaterial. That central question – how many games should there be in a Gaelic football season – is the one to focus on. And they decided to take weekends out of the championship, not the league. Politics is the art of the possible, and GAA politics is the art of the passable (at Congress), so there’s every chance that this element of their plan is an acknowledgement that what is likely to get through at central level is not necessarily what they would do if they were given a blank sheet of paper.
I have no such weighty considerations to take into account. Having watched the entire All-Ireland football championship this year, I could not point you to one single game, one single occasion in the national league this year that told us anything about how the year at Sam Maguire level would eventually finish. The league was completely and utterly beside the point. And yet, even Galway’s proposed plan devotes well over half the playing season to it.
There’s a fair argument to say that Mayo in 2023, and Derry in 2024 look on their league final wins as the moment their season went south. Who wants to win it in 2025? Is there one team out there that actually wants to end the first half of the intercounty season a winner?
This is the nettle that people are afraid to grasp. There are only nine or 10 hurling counties at the top level. Having a hurling league, followed by a grouped provincial championship, followed by the All-Ireland series isn’t perfect, but the hurling league doesn’t derail the entire season. It doesn’t really matter, but that’s okay. Their championship works. That luxury does not exist in football.
The addition of a third tier to the football championship was one of the ideas rejected by Central Council on Saturday. Revisit that. Let the top 12 teams in the country compete for the Sam Maguire, in two groups of six. Five group games each to sort out seedings, with straight knock-out rounds of the provincial championships played throughout the season like the FA Cup in English soccer, and then the All-Ireland series, again played as a straight knock-out, with relegation to the second tier in the mix too. Let the Tailteann Cup have the same format, with the bottom eight teams competing in an eight-team league division, with the top two in that division playing a promotion final.
So how many games should an intercounty team play every season? I think eight or nine is plenty … but if they are playing games, let’s make damn sure they all count.