Time now to check in on the Tailteann Cup – the football championship’s second tier competition and occasional irritant of the one-eyed hurling pundit. We join it at the start of its fourth season and so far it looks like everyone is still aboard. This is not as small a victory as it might appear.
Go back to the founding of the competition and the big fear early on was that John Horan’s brainchild might be strangled at birth. The old Tommy Murphy Cup had gone up in smoke through a combination of disinterest and derision and the GAA was adamant that the Tailteann Cup had to avoid that fate. Nothing would kill it quicker than the participating counties only half-playing in it.
Four years in and they appear to have got out the gap on that, at least. Run your finger through the squad lists for this weekend and there’s no indication that managers have had to go knocking on doors to make up the numbers. The Tommy Murphy days of harassed officials going around clubs trying to dragoon impressionable young lads into playing are long in the past.
Take Kildare, who for better or worse are the highest profile team involved this time around. They haven’t shelled anybody since losing to Louth last month. It’s the opposite, if anything – Jimmy Hyland is back from injury for his first championship start since 2022. By and large, that’s been the way of it everywhere.
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One reason for this is that the Tailteann Cup has assumed an identity that the Tommy Murphy Cup was never able to get for itself. It’s not an afterthought. For the vast majority of the counties involved, it’s a fixed and critical part of the annual calendar. Twenty counties have played in the Tailteann Cup over the past four seasons, 14 of them in each iteration. This is their championship.
They’ve all had their day in it too. Other than New York, who join each year at the preliminary quarter-final stage, every county has posted at least one win in the competition. Waterford beat Longford last year, London hammered Offaly. Leitrim won two matches in the 2024 campaign and were unbeaten in regulation play in 2022, only going out to Sligo on penalties.
So if nothing else, the Tailteann Cup has established base camp. The concept of a tiered football championship was alien for the first century of the GAA, but it’s here now and there’s no prospect of it going anywhere. First job completed.
The question is what next. The Tailteann Cup had so much goodwill around it at the start that plenty of people were willing to overlook its flaws. In the spirit of not making perfect the enemy of good, there was more cheerleading than nitpicking. That was fine when the competition was furiously beating its wings trying to get airborne. But it’s in a different place now.
[ Eoghan Frayne and Meath out to right some wrongs against Louth in Leinster finalOpens in new window ]
An obvious issue is the small pool of potential winners. If a championship is only as strong as the teams with a genuine chance of lifting the trophy, the Tailteann Cup has a distance to go yet. The three winners so far were Westmeath (finished third in Division 3 in 2022), Meath (finished sixth in Division 2 in 2023) and Down (finished first in Division 3 in 2024).
Essentially, if you were to rank each team at the end of the respective leagues, the Tailteann Cup was won by the third best team in 2022 and the best team in both ’23 and ’24. And although two of the three runners-up started the season in Division 4, Cavan were essentially a Division 2 team that had endured a couple of careless leagues by the time 2022 came around.
The top four seeds this time around are Offaly, Kildare, Westmeath and Fermanagh. On a good day, Sligo will be a danger to any one of that quartet, but it feels highly unlikely that the 2025 champions will come from outside those five. Is that sustainable for the other dozen counties? Drill down into the results and you’d have to wonder how much longer they’ll want to throw themselves into it with a full heart.
Maybe you take those teams and the top tier of the Tailteann and make that the second tier
There have been 86 Tailteann Cup matches played so far. Of those, 59 have been between teams who started the season in different divisions. Of those, 14 have seen lower division counties beat higher division ones. Division 4 teams have won eight matches against Division 3 teams and four against counties who started in Division 2.
The most common result in three seasons of the Tailteann Cup has been a victory for a Division 3 side over a Division 4 one – it’s happened 27 times in 38 games. Are those numbers good? Are they worrying? The sample size is still probably a bit small to be definitive either way. But instinctively it feels like an argument for a third tier.
This is especially true when you sit down and look at how the Sam Maguire is likely to play out. In a wide open race, there are still half a dozen teams who will neither go all the way nor cause much trouble for the counties who have designs on Sam. Maybe you take those teams and the top tier of the Tailteann and make that the second tier, leaving the remaining eight or so to play for a third-tier championship.
It’s not an original thought but the case for it is obvious enough in theory. And maybe that’s where it should stay – it could well be that the counties involved are only too happy to take their chance every year in tier-two competition and have no desire to be further stratified. Maybe they want to just get on with a very young tournament that they’re still only getting used to.
Because what the Tailteann Cup needs most of all is an end to gobshites in the paper checking in and asking how the Tailteann Cup is getting on. It’s not there yet (and well done for making it this far). But it’s getting there.
