The ledger for most clubs is now complete for the year. Two weeks ago, I heard quite a few people telling me what a shame it was the year would soon be over. Now, with darkness setting in by 7pm, it seems like a pretty good time to say goodbye to the boots for a couple of months.
There are still a few clubs left, most of them now in the glory game, a despairing few trying to avoid relegation. But for the vast majority, they can close the book on 2024. And the first, most pressing question that will be asked in plenty of dressingrooms and clubhouses is — was yer man any use at all for all the money we gave him?
It was so interesting reading Tim Healy’s interview with Seán Moran in The Irish Times last Saturday. His suggestion of an upper limit on what a club or county unit can pay a manager should have been met with gasps of dismay throughout a truly amateur organisation ... but the GAA is not quite that, is it?
If the Football Review Committee under Jim Gavin look like a group in a hurry to get things done, the amateur status committee have also been told that the GAA want something enforceable by 2025
David Hassan is at the head of Jarlath Burns’s other blue riband committee, set up in the early days of his presidency. The Football Review Committee (FRC) have their coming-out party in Croke Park on Friday week, and it’s fair to say that interprovincial series, played over two nights, has got a more energetic, more thorough build-up in the media than either All-Ireland final received this year.
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But the other committee Burns set up has the issue of amateurism in its sights, and the “runaway train” of intercounty expenditure in particular. It was almost €40 million last year, and it feels safe to presume it’ll be well north of that in 2024. If the FRC under Jim Gavin look like a group in a hurry to get things done, the amateur status committee have also been told that the GAA want something enforceable by 2025.
Healy’s suggestion that there be a levy imposed on the appointment of outside managers of €30,000, with a levy of €3,000 or €5,000 at club level, should be revolutionary. It should be a topic of discussion in every clubhouse. But most people’s reaction to that is: would you be able to get anyone any good to do the job for that sort of money?
Another, more powerful, argument in Healy’s favour is that intercounty managers deserve to get paid. They are doing a job which is now effectively full-time
Healy is right, of course. He’s absolutely right. This money is being paid already. An acknowledgment that it’s happening, and a realisation that Revenue will someday (and that day may soon be coming) start taking an interest in this, would be overdue.
But another, more powerful, argument in Healy’s favour is that intercounty managers deserve to get paid. They are doing a job which is now effectively full-time. And if the administrators who hire these managers are paid, as more and more of them are, then the black-and-white ideal of amateurism is already getting rather murky.
When I spoke to various people in the GAA about the move to paying full-time administrators for a chapter of my book This Is The Life, I was told it happened because the workload involved in running a county board was too much to expect an amateur to do. This was undoubtedly the case. It was an acknowledgment that what went before wouldn’t do now. Circumstances had changed. The job had changed.
There’s no doubt we have reached a similar inflexion point for intercounty management. So why not admit it? But the idea of paying managers is only ever brought up as a counterpoint to the idea of the players remaining amateur. No one ever pays attention to the fact that on the rung above the manager, we already have plenty of fully paid professionals. Paid administrators are just not seen as a threat to the GAA’s amateur status.
Healy’s assertion that the work of both of Jarlath Burns’s committees is actually linked was less compelling to me.
“If they are getting 25, 30 grand, which a lot of them are, they’ll want to make a second year, so they set out to make the team ‘hard to beat’. The high-profile critics are missing a trick here because we are actually paying guys to make football less attractive at club level.”
I’m not convinced club managers should be paid officially either, but maybe I will have to get over my distaste on that score — because unofficially, it’s rampant
I’m not convinced of that. I’ve given coaches of all stripes, home-grown or otherwise, seven or eight years to coach our way out of this defensive style of play and it hasn’t happened. I think it’s a stretch to say playing style is overtly influenced by outside managers. The game got to where it is today with the help of all kinds of coaches, the home-grown ones included.
I’m not convinced club managers should be paid officially either, but maybe I will have to get over my distaste on that score — because unofficially, it’s rampant.
Similar to the discussion on the integration of women’s football and camogie, where we are constantly bombarded with figures about what it will cost to provide pitches for all of this club activity, my answer to the idea of paying club managers is this: it’s already happening, integration is already here. These teams already exist. And managers are already getting paid.
Maybe it’s time for us all to start living in the GAA world as it already is, not the one we’re happy to delude ourselves exists.
