What if county players don’t want to train less?

As the Christmas lights start to flicker, lights in the world of GAA also switched this past week, from red to green, with counties permitted to return to collective training officially as Friday marked six weeks until the start of inter-county competition at the start of January, with the various provincial competitions in football and hurling.

For an organisation that has such an intangible link with the high weather of mid-summer, the GAA is no stranger to action taking place at this time of the year. Indeed, a glance at the calendar shows the All-Ireland football championship final often took place on a variety of dates during the course of the year – one such example being Kerry’s victory over Wexford in 1913 on December 14.

More recently, Covid forced Mayo to play Dublin in the 2020 decider on December 19, while there was a period not too long ago when it was a regular custom to start the National League in October, with a full pre-Christmas schedule for counties around the country.

Now, in an increasingly professional environment, the need for a defined off-season for our top inter-county players has become a much more topical issue in light of the introduction of the split season.

The criticism of the split season model has been a tad puzzling from this writer's viewpoint in recent years. The data has shown that players are overwhelmingly supportive of the split-season model, with the GPA’s 2025 report indicating that 89 percent of members surveyed continued to support the current season schedule.

Such an emphatic result should settle any debate around whether the split season is a good idea or not. Finding an extra week or two at the end, and bringing the All-Ireland finals into August, is likely to happen in the coming years but overall the split season has been a real success for our players, who remain, by some distance, the most important stakeholder in the debate.

In light of the even more pressing demands on time, the GAA and the GPA have made commendable efforts around the player welfare issue, which is a nigh-on impossible one to try and solve. No-contact November – a policy where players would be totally free of inter-county activity for the entire month – was one such initiative which appeared to have some buy-in around the country.

The return of pre-season competitions means a no-contact November is not possible this year, but you have to remember that even in the absence of official training sessions, county players are at a minimum working on individual fitness plans come November anyway, in the same way that counties would be playing challenge matches in January if there were no official fixtures laid out by provincial councils.

The return of pre-season competitions is a positive and there will be a real sense of excitement in these parts in particular for the FBD League encounter between Sligo and Mayo on the first weekend in January, with two new management teams patrolling the sidelines.

The challenge for the GAA and the GPA when it comes to player welfare is that hurling and football, for all intents and purposes, have become sports that demand professional standards from amateur athletes. Advances in sports science and performance analysis has contributed significantly to a professionalisation in Gaelic Games but that also creates an added cost for county boards, who are challenged year-on-year to stump up the cash to cover additional expenses in order to facilitate an environment in which their players can succeed. That issue is one that GAA officials have expressed concern about, but solutions have been in short supply.

GAA President, Jarlath Burns, said last month that the Amateur Status Committee will be bringing ‘radical’ proposals forward next year around how to address growing demands on inter-county players and county board volunteers.

“Essentially what we're trying to achieve,” Burns said at October’s Special Congress, “is to make it easier for our county players to play the game and live their lives. And to make it easier for our counties to pay for playing the game at the highest level.” 

While the aims of such a committee are admirable, it’s very difficult to see what form any change can take. Inter-county footballers are top, top athletes; professional in all but name, supremely talented and role models in their local communities.

They are also exceptionally competitive human beings. They have to be to thrive at the top level – and that means they want to be fitter, faster and stronger than their opponents. In many cases, players will go to extraordinary lengths to achieve just that.

To help reach those levels, they will rightly demand from their own county set-ups the best-in-class of everything; if a player is putting in that amount of effort and building their life around playing inter-county football or hurling, quite frankly, it’s the least they deserve.

Some suggestions have been made in recent years that a limit could be put on the number of training sessions a team can hold, but it’s impossible to implement this. How can you turn around to players and say we want to limit the time you have to prepare, especially when they’ve already experienced what is needed to reach maximum potential? You can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube.

The Amateur Status Committee have their work cut out.