What further indignities can we visit upon the football and hurling leagues? Could we maybe get the players to turn out for the weekend’s games wearing red noses? Could the refs fit a water-squirting rose to their shirt pocket so that every time they reach for a card players have to duck for cover? Maybe we could get the teams to just play games of rock-paper-scissors and be done with it.
The league’s final weekend could be anything. It could be one of the great setpieces of the Irish sporting calendar. A chance for the national sports to plant a flag for the summer to come. The men’s’ Six Nations is done. Cheltenham is over. The Premier League is all but sorted. Domestic soccer is just getting going. This weekend is a chance for the GAA to go “thanks everybody, we’ll take it from here”.
Instead what have we got? A hurling league that is still, for all the changes, a phoney war. A football league finishing so close to the championship that nobody can be sure of the worth of trying to win it. Matches piled on top of each other like battery hens, squawking and clawing for attention. Everything happening everywhere all at once.
At around two o’clock on Sunday afternoon the lower three divisions of the football league will have 24 teams all playing at the same time. The GAA have at least staggered them so that the Division Four games will be midway through the second half by then, with the Division Three games just starting and the Division Two games approaching half time.
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But even so keeping track of it all will be like trying to watch a gang of toddlers juggle knives on a trampoline. Your eyes and ears will be drawn in 40 different directions, and it will be all but impossible to work out what is most important at any one time.
Is this Cavan goal in Breffni a bigger deal than that Kildare black card in Newbridge? Waterford are leading Limerick, which would be a huge favour to Wicklow but Wicklow are losing to Tipperary so it’s not going to matter unless they get going here and hang on, was that a sending off in the Louth v Meath game? Can everything please just stop happening for 30 goddamn seconds?
It doesn’t need to be this way. There are four divisions in the football league. There are four mainstream fixture slots. Two on Saturday, one at five, one at seven. Two on Sunday, one at two and one at four. What would be wrong with playing Divisions Four and Two on Saturday and giving over Sunday to Divisions Three and One?
The upsides are obvious. Each division gets its own slice of the weekend’s pie. The stakes for each slot are easily and readily understood. These teams can go up, these teams can go down. This county is playing to get into the Sam Maguire in the summer, this team is trying to stay out of the Tailteann Cup. Clear, simple, tidy.
Crucially, it demands very little of the floating public. Sport is popular around the world because people get invested when the stakes are obvious. You can’t expect everybody to know offhand who is in Division Two of the football league and who is in Division Three and why this weekend will dictate the year for the likes of Louth and Cork and Down and Offaly and Clare and Kildare.
And you certainly can’t expect them to make sense of it all when a million different mini-events are overlapping with each other in real time, butterfly wings flapping on all parts of the map, sometimes in the same division and sometimes not. Most casual observers – and plenty of genuinely interested ones – will just throw their hands in the air and walk away with their brain throbbing.
[ TG4 to broadcast all Division One and Two football league games liveOpens in new window ]
As for the downside of dividing the football slots out that way, the only obvious one surrounds what to do with the end of the hurling league. The reason for the football mishmash on Sunday is that the decks have been cleared for a hurling Saturday. But couldn’t that have been pushed on to next weekend?
After this round of games all but four of the hurling counties have a full month until their next match. Why wouldn’t you set next Saturday night up as the last round of the hurling league? That way, just as with the football, the final would take place the weekend after the last round of group games.
If the fear is a clash with the Division Three and Four football finals, just put those games on in the afternoon. Nobody goes to them anyway and any supporters who do will appreciate the games not ending so late that they either have to pay Dublin prices to stay over or drive home in the dead of night.
Fixture-making isn’t ever as simple as gobshites giving out in the media make it out to be. Every round of matches is another air bubble under the wallpaper and smoothing one out unusually has a knock-on effect elsewhere. Someone is always losing out. But this one really doesn’t seem as complicated as the GAA has made it.
But then again should we be surprised? So far the 2025 leagues have had to endure (a) the loss of the pre-season competitions, causing teams to arrive into it undercooked, (b) a complete overhaul of football rules, (c) a mid-competition overhaul of the overhaul.
Throw in (d) a mid-competition change in hurling refereeing, causing yellow cards one week to be reds six days later, (e) a football league that ends a week before the provincial championships begin, (f) a hurling league in which the All-Ireland champions have been relegated with a game to go but nobody knows what it means until Cork come to Ennis on Easter Sunday.
Given all that it’s a wonder the 2025 leagues, battered and blootered as they are, have made it this far at all. Allianz must have the patience of saints.
