SPENDING on county teams rose to an eye-watering €44million (almost £37million) last year and that “needs to change” says GAA Director General Tom Ryan.
At the launch of the GAA report of 2024 at Croke Park, Ryan said the Association was “thriving” but outlined his concern at how expenditure on inter-county panels was up by four million Euro on last year.
That figure is not “sustainable or affordable” said Ryan, but he admitted he wasn’t clear how the GAA would combat the spiralling costs associated with producing professional-standard athletes for amateur sports.
“That’s a responsibility that sits jointly between counties and ourselves,” he said.
“A lot of it will be around the common commitment we have with the GPA at the moment around contact hours for players and making the lot of players a bit more reasonable – and that’s not merely from a cost point of view, it’s from a point of view of the effort they have to expend to reach the levels they are reaching at the moment.
“It’s difficult to see where the level we have now is going to take us in five or 10 years’ time if we don’t arrest it.
“What it means is spending less (money), expending less effort, it means a collective acknowledgment on the part of everybody that we centralise procurement whether that by travel or related services around the training.
“It means thinking about things differently.
“If we knew how we were going to solve it, it would have been solved before now. There’s an awful lot that is really, really good about the inter-county scene so we need to be careful that we don’t damage it but we’re at the stage now where, if we’re sitting here having the same conversation in five years’ time, it’ll be too late really.”
The annual report highlighted how 13 counties (up from six in 2023) had run into financial difficulties last year and in his submission Ger Mulryan, the GAA’s Director of Finance, said the cost of running county teams was a considerable “drain on expenses”.
Talking about curbing spending is one thing, actually doing it is another as the GAA have found out in the past.
“Up to now what we have done is try and convince people about stuff, cajole people and incentivise,” added Ryan.
“In terms of carrot and stick, we do a bit more carrot than stick. It (enforcement) is not really the way we’ve gone about things but that probably needs to be in the arsenal going forward.
“How you enforce those things in a voluntary sector is really, really difficult. What’s more important is a collective buy-in from all counties and the decision-makers (managers) in counties that this is the route that we’re going to go on.
“The things about the stick part, we’ve seen it before. We brought it in for counties going on overseas on team holidays (2019). Some counties didn’t comply with that and some did and we ended up that some were penalised unfairly. We don’t want to have an environment where people who do their best to comply, but fail, are penalised and other people just go under the radar and are able to continue.
“So we don’t have a great track record in terms of the enforcement side of the things and we need to think a bit differently.”
