With impeccable timing, we are within a week of the 10th anniversary of a previous row about the commercial letting of Croke Park: the great Limerick migratory scandal of 2014 when Kerry and Mayo supporters had to go to the Gaelic Grounds for that year’s All-Ireland semi-final replay.
This was forced on them by an American football match between Penn State and the University of Central Florida being booked in on Jones’s Road on the date of the replay.
Unfortunate timing for sure, but it had been booked in a year in advance when the relevant weekend was free so what was to be done?
Anyway, everyone eventually got over themselves and the matter receded into the past but it had caused certain misgivings to flare for a while: the commercialisation of the GAA, as evidenced by American football being elevated over an All-Ireland semi-final and, in what was a popular theme at the time, the growing ‘disconnect’ between the Croke Park secretariat and the membership at large.
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The following year in his annual report, DG Páraic Duffy went through some of the major projects being undertaken by the GAA and defended the need to use Croke Park to generate income.
“The list goes on, extending into games development, player welfare, and the development of club and county grounds. It is a financial fact of life for the association that it must put Croke Park to use in the necessity to increase our funding base.
“I utterly refute the claim that the American football game was part of a simple money-making exercise for the sake of pure financial gain. We simply don’t think that way; we think only in terms of generating income that will go back out to our clubs and counties, and that will help us fund projects already decided on.”
In the past week or so, the bones of that controversy have been given another rattle by the Oasis concerts, booked in for next August. The two dates, 16th and 17th, have been seen as a de facto settling of the argument that the All-Ireland championships need a bigger calendar footprint.
This comes before Central Council get a chance to discuss the matter on Saturday. Although any extension of the timetable was unlikely to be greater than a fortnight, the two weekends of August 3rd and 10th are due to be taken up with the women’s finals.
It’s a long time since the GAA would have been comfortable bumping the sister organisations out of their dates and the imminence of integration in four years makes it impossible. There are the Saturdays, which could facilitate double All-Ireland weekends, as happened in the winter championships of 2020.
It appears though that there will be little appetite to try to push the issue even if resentment is brewing over what is seen as the peremptory settling of the matter by a piece of commercial business.
Even were the argument to expand the season successful, the redrawing of schedules for 2025 would be a pretty long shot at this stage, requiring a decision of congress, which would not be available until the end of November when the special congress to deliberate on the recommendations of Jim Gavin’s Football Review Committee takes place.
Annually, the fixtures list is well drawn up by the end of the year, meaning that any decision to alleviate the congested schedules would have to wait until 2026.
On Saturday, one decision that is expected is acceptance of a new football championship format, eliminating the All-Ireland round-robin structure and replacing it with a repurposed schedule of knockout matches more akin to the old qualifiers.
The new blueprint is expected to secure approval and it too will have to go to congress or special congress and whereas it would be possible to accommodate it in next year’s schedules, as the calendar would be no different, there is a suggestion that this too might wait until 2026.
Retaining the original split-season model for a third year was always on the cards, as the period is seen as the optimum for review and the identification of issues.
The conundrum is that it may be comparatively straightforward to reduce the championship window but increasing it again is more of a challenge. For a start, it would entail telling the clubs that you were going to take dates away from them – having just provided the extra weeks for a couple of seasons.
If that’s what the association wants to do, well and good, but problems and solutions have a peculiar dynamic in the GAA. Implement a solution to a long-identified problem and the downside of the solution quickly becomes nearly as debilitating as the original difficulty.
There is no doubt that issues exist within the current schedules but they are not necessarily to blame for all that has gone wrong in the past two championships. The most serious, the decline in football attendances, is a reflection of the competitive dysfunction of the Leinster and Munster championships and that has more to do with the unassailability of Dublin and Kerry.
The same condensed format applies to the Munster hurling championship, which has broken attendance records over the last three years but which crucially also provides keen competition despite having culminated in the same Munster final over the same period.
There are those who might rather read animal entrails than see another sub-committee, work group or taskforce set up but at this stage a co-ordinated assessment of the data rather than a series of individual reactions would be more helpful in plotting a way forward with a special congress this time next year in order to allow for implementation in 2026.
sean.moran@irishtimes.com
