Dessie Farrell says the GAA championship needs to move to a Champions League-style structure

Jaysus lads, how many times are we going to tamper with a 130-year-old system?

The GAA has been going since 1884, the All-Ireland championship since ’87, and it probably hasn’t seen as much change in that time as it has this decade.

Now, GPA CEO Dessie Farrell is calling for more transformation.  And not just any old kind.  A complete revamp of the summer as we know it.

Imagine eight groups, four teams in each – five teams in one of them – playing each other in a round-robin format.  Two qualify from each into a last 16.  It would be pretty cool actually, if just for the novelty of it, but then the question begs how you go about seeding and what you do with the provincial competition.

After the Gaelic Players Association’s annual Rep Summit last weekend, Farrell concluded however that there was a sense from players that the current championship format was “broken.”

Speaking with the Irish Examiner, the Dubliner pondered how they could bring about change.

“For a cohort of players, the provincial championship is very important to them and then for another cohort, they think the provincial championship is broke and that it needs to move to a Champions League-style structure,” he said.

“The question is, can you combine both? And if you do, what does that new season look like, and how does that impact on the club season as well?  There possibly is a way to marry the whole lot together.

“There are a lot of sacred cows within the GAA, we all know that. I think there’s a challenge there with trying to be innovative and bring about change because there’s a reluctance to embrace change in any organisation.”

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