Revamping The Gaelic Football Championship II
The F.A. Cup Model
To read about a more radical approach go here.
In English football, the Premier League is the big one, the one they all want to win. The F.A. Cup, especially in recent years, has become somewhat of an after-thought for clubs. A chore of a competition that managers and players pay lip-service to due to it’s historical prestige.
I had somewhat of a epiphany watching League Sunday highlights from the latest round of the National Football League the other night: THE LEAGUE is the superior competition.
“The League is better than the Championship!”
Yet while the English public’s love for the F.A. Cup has waned in recent years, the Irish public and GAA players in general only really care about winning one competition - The Championship.
The League is undervalued and the Championship is broken. I’ve previously talked about how I think the Championship can be saved from ever-increasing dullness and predictability,
But…
maybe we don’t need to save the Championship! Maybe, like the F.A. Cup, we should let it take it’s natural course and hope that the GAA public eventually see’s what I’ve come to see - The League is where it’s at in terms of top class football in the 21st Century.
I think there’s one major change we can make, not to the competition structure as such but to the timing of each competition:
We should run both competitions side by side.
Just like the Premier League and F.A. Cup, we intersperse Championship games throughout the League season. It’s difficult for the League to take centre stage if it remains the “Warm-up” competition. Moving them side by side will give a little psychological push to people to see both competitions as equals.
The best thing about this revamp is that nothing really needs to change in terms of structure. Hopefully the only thing that will change is people’s interest in the League. Because look, it’s objectively the better competition. Each year, 31 All-Division One games are played in the league. Almost all of these teams are evenly matched. The quality of football is high and the result is never a fore-gone conclusion. Compare that to the Championship. If we are lucky we will get 5 or 6 All-Division One matchup’s with 3 of those coming in the final two rounds of the competition. A little like the F.A. Cup a plucky underdog will make a burst most years, and maybe, if they are lucky, get to a quarter-final where they will be sent packing by one of the big guns. The early rounds of the Championship are full of mismatches with Ulster generally being the only province to keep us guessing as to the eventual victors.
The Next Level:
We could stop there, but personally, I think we can go one or two step’s further. If we can get people to see that the league is equally important, if not more so, then we can start to scale back the Championship. We need to make more room for club fixtures and reduce the workload on inter-county players. So the first thing to go will be the “Back-Door”. The back door was invented because people love Championship football and with a back door we can to see more Championship football. More money in the GAA coffers essentially. The idea that it’s a second chance for the weaker counties is a myth. A second chance at what? At getting beaten again one or two games down the line by a Division 1 team by 10 or 15 points?
The back-door was basically a mechanism for getting both Cork and Kerry into the All-Ireland series.
With the back-door gone, if teams now lose in the championship they will still have the league to focus on. The best way for the weaker teams to improve is by playing better teams week-in week-out, so the goal of promotion to Division One will quickly become of greater importance to these teams than the championship currently is.
The final stage of streamlining the championship is to scrap the Provincial system. It’s lop-sided, predictable and a complete bore-fest. Let’s instead have an open draw. To reduce the amount of mismatches we could, like the F.A. Cup, have the teams from the lower leagues play each other in the earliest rounds first.
Let’s draw up a hypothetical League + Championship Schedule:
- League Round 1
- League Rd 2
- Championship Rd 1 (Div 3/4 = 16 Teams -> 8 Games)
- League Rd 3
- League Rd 4
- Championship Rd 2 (8 teams from Rd 1 + 8 Div 2 teams -> 8 Games)
- League Rd 5
- Championship Rd 3 (8 teams from Rd 2 + 8 Div 1 teams -> 8 Games)
- League Rd 6
- Championship Qtr-Finals
- League Rd 7
- Championship Semi-Finals
- League Final Weekend — Double Headers Div 2 + Div 3 Final On Saturday - Div 1 + Div 4 Finals on Sunday
- Championship Final
In terms of the exact sequence - that can be up for debate, it’s not super important. We can start off with League final double headers but if crowds increase for league finals as I hope they would then we can split them up. Could also look at adding a league Semi Final stage if the GAA want more games.
That’s everything wrapped up in 14 weeks, leaving 38 weeks for club football. With that much time both Club and County players could take winter off instead of having to commit 10–11 months of the year to the sport each year!
The Provincials:
We all know the power of the provincial councils in terms of any big decision made at GAA HQ, so realistically they would never vote for a system like the above where they would basically become defunct. With this in mind I would propose we also run the provincial championships as secondary cup competitions — to continue with the English football analogy they would be the equivalent of the “League Cup”. This might appease the Provincial Council members. Maybe!
We have an even more radical solution to the Championship Revamp in a previous article and you can read it here.
