GAA needs to provide incentive to keep players at home
With too many having too little to play for, a summer in the US with money in your pocket is a no-brainer
IHAD my ego stroked and my wallet teased recently. There has been a lot of talk lately, some of it stirred by a member my own family circle, about how Kerry’s young bucks are in danger of being lost to riches in foreign lands.
Maybe, but some of the old fellas still have value on the foreign market.
Not too long after I announced my retirement, I had a couple of offers from America to go and play some ball this summer.
For obvious reasons, it was something I never had a shot at when I was playing for Kerry and the approaches amounted to nothing more than flattery.
The first was for $10,000, flights and the promise of a good job, but I declined. The second was even sweeter – $15,000, flights, accommodation and a ‘handy job’ – but again I declined.
There were two reasons for that, family and club.
In truth, I am pretty sure that if I wanted to ship my better half and children over for the summer that would have been facilitated, too – I know of one player who was accommodated in that way.
However, there was no way I could take the second family with me.
The carrot for me, when finishing with Kerry, was that I could bring it all back home to the club. I don’t want to sound holier-than-thou, but I owe Gaeltacht so much and this is the only real chance I have to pay it back.
And it’s not really a debt, this is where I want to be this summer and a few extra bucks in the bank will not compare to the value I am squeezing out of these days.
But if I was young, free and single and I knew, in my heart, that the only chance of getting into Croke Park this summer was by paying the admission, what then? Hasta la vista, baby.
And that is the farewell greeting that will be ringing in the ears of county managers up and down the country for the next month.
Not in Jim Gavin’s, Éamonn Fitz’s or Stephen Rochford’s, perhaps, but outside the top eight teams every promising player is ripe for the American market.
All good players who would make moderate teams a lot better if they stayed around, but how do you keep them?
I was listening to the Wicklow manager Johnny Magee last weekend, a passionate football man who has emptied himself in a cause where there is not even a whiff of glory on offer.
His team went down fighting bravely to Louth, and who knows what might have happened had a couple of their players not been lost to the United States this summer.
They are not the first to go and, most certainly, will not be the last. By the time the qualifiers start next month several players who will have featured in the provincial Championships will already have high-tailed it across the Atlantic. It is ironic that the last few weeks have been consumed by talk about what the GAA can do about the AFL poaching top talent, when the reality is that it can do very little. The same cannot be said about the mid-summer player drain to the United States.
Of course, ultimately the decision comes down to the individual and the promise of a summer in an exciting city like New York, a few dollars for party money and a job to take the bare look off a student’s bank account when he returns home, is very appealing.
But the main reason young talented footballers leave during summer is because there is nothing to keep them, certainly not for the likes of Wicklow.
It is easily forgotten but adding to Liam Kearns’ achievement in taking Tipperary to last year’s All-Ireland semi-final is that he managed to do so while losing three players to the US.
But what Tipp achieved is the exception; the rule is that those counties affected usually slump and sink.
Ultimately it is an indictment of a Championship structure which offers too many too little to play for, ensuring they are open to invites to the United States to play low level ball in peak season.
And most players do not make that decision lightly. You will find that they will commit right through the winter so that they are ready to play in the spring but yet when, what should amount to, the high point of their season comes around, they will pack their bags and head off.
But then what is going to keep you? The promise of two games in a competition which you know you have no chance of winning?
That is why – even though the prospect of next year’s Super 8s excites me – the GAA will have to go back to the drawing board sooner rather than later. They will have to put a structure in place which will engage all players and not just the elite few.
That will most likely mean returning to the GPA model of a champions league format in which every county will be invited to participate in, feeding into the play-off rounds of the AllIreland series.
On top of that, a second tier championship that is structured in such a way that it does not become a second-class one has to be top of the GAA agenda.
In fact that is a lesson that has to be taken on board right across the GAA.
It is common place in the club game for students to head to the US in the summer in the knowledge they will miss little or no Championship football, but that can leave a lasting and damaging legacy.
I have seen it happen in my own club and we dropped down the league divisions as a result, momentum bleeding out of us. This year we are all staying around because nothing beats playing with your own.
The GAA needs to ensure, though, that we all have something to play for in summer.
I couldn’t turn my back on the club just for a few bucks