One of the more noteworthy parts of the Football Review Committee’s (FRC) work over the last two years was their almost complete disregard for what the players wanted. As a group, players were deemed just a little too close to the whole affair to be deemed disinterested (as opposed to uninterested) observers.
Michael Murphy, before his dramatic return to the playing ranks, even said as much when he was invited aboard, 12 months or more into his retirement. He was inclined to instinctively vote ‘no’ whenever he was canvassed by the Gaelic Players Association (GPA) for an opinion on an incoming rule change when he was a player. He had enough to be worrying about. So he was as close to a current player as they were willing to get ... until he shocked his fellow committee members, and everyone else, by returning to the Donegal fold and giving up his seat at the decision-making table.
But the GPA were canvassing opinion again over the course of the last two months. They felt duty-bound to release the players’ feelings on the FRC recommendations before special congress, which was correct of course, but the rest of the results of their wide-ranging annual survey was released this week.
Seán Moran wrote about their thoughts on payments to managers, but two other survey results also stand out. Players want a seven-month intercounty season, and they love the split season, with 92 per cent of GPA members believing the intercounty season should run for a maximum of seven months from the first collective training session to the last game of the year.
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Seventy-one per cent of all male footballers want the All-Ireland football final to be played in July, while 48 per cent of all male players want to see both intercounty senior finals played by the end of July.
These are unequivocal numbers. Players want to play for their county, and they want to play for their club, and they want a proper off-season. What’s stopping us? County boards don’t want to run training sessions – in Michael Moynihan’s fine new book More Than A Game, he tries to do the maths on what one regular training session costs, and the sheer variety of costs is dizzying. They don’t want to be paying that three times a week, at least, for nine months a year. If the people footing the bill – and the players – don’t want to be there, this doesn’t seem like quite the insuperable problem we make it out to be.
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The chief executive of the GPA, Tom Parsons, was quoted, saying: “There are a lot of individual conversations I’ve had with players who would love the National Leagues to start mid-February and to be returning to training in January and remove this huge load of training over the Christmas period when pitches are poor and we’re not in the new year.
“So you can have a seven-month season going into August, but you’re going to have to take it off the other end.”
This argument always goes back to time, dates, return-to-training bans – as if that was the only axis on this graph where there could possibly be any movement. We have too many games, in not enough time. I’m glad the GPA asked the players how long they thought the intercounty season should be. The next obvious question to ask is – how many games should make up an intercounty season? Because that number should not be set in stone.
If we insist on playing the league, it doesn’t have to be seven games. It can be four or five games in two conferences, encompassing the present-day Divisions 1 and 2 together in one conference, and Divisions 3 and 4 in the other. Draw up a reasonably fair schedule for everyone, and play it like the Champions League league phase (yes, that is its official name), or the United Rugby Championship.
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Or get rid of the league altogether and play one tournament in whatever format you like. The central idea must be to play fewer games, but make them all more meaningful. It always feels like we’re crawling towards the solution, but when you step away from it, the entire idea of the National Football League is utterly absurd.
It either matters an inordinate amount, to the teams in Division 3 and 4, which means they’re playing their most important games of the year in one nine-week period in the worst weather, or you get teams in Division 1 trying desperately to win their first three or four games and then applying the handbrake whenever they like thereafter.
If you lose in the preliminary quarter-final of the Ulster championship as a Sam Maguire team, you get seven league games in nine weeks, then a five- or six-week break, and then three games in four weeks to decide your fate in the All-Ireland championship. That is a completely daft, physically reckless schedule. Players deserve better.
But why should we listen to the players here, and not last year? Because if they were asked about the FRC rule changes, they’d be governed by self-interest. If a rule did not suit the type of football they as a team played last year, then that rule must be attacked. When they talk about a seven-month season, it’s a message of self-preservation. Whatever the level they’re playing at, this is the amount they’re willing to commit. County boards are eager to do the same. Will county managers, the last bastion, heed the message?
