Jack Anderson: No going back once a sport moves to non-amateur status
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The GAA have a problem with Jim Gavin. He has set the bar too high. A top-class player, coach and now administrator, he has, in less than a year, convinced GAA Congress to change the way Gaelic football will be played for years to come.
GAA Congress usually turns slowly. If it were the Titanic, it would have hit the iceberg dead on. If Jim Gavin was captain of the Titanic, it wouldn’t have hit it at all.
The pace at which Gavin and his committee moved contrasts with the glacial pace of the GAA’s Steering Group on Integration (with Ladies Gaelic Football and Camogie). To be fair, theirs is the much more complex task - an administrative, logistical, and regulatory undertaking, that must, in effect, be written in triplicate. The Steering Group has an undertaking not ever seen before in Irish sport.
The other group commissioned by GAA President Jarlath Burns that will now come into focus is the amateur status committee, chaired by David Hassan.
Arguably, theirs is the most fraught task of all. The remit for Jim Gavin’s committee was to focus on how one game is played. The Steering Group’s terms of reference revolve around who administers the games but the underlying focus for Hassan’s group is the why – why players play the game, why volunteers commit so much time etc.
Listening to a recent interview with Jim Gavin, it was interesting to note that in that ferociously logical way of his, the first thing he said to his other committee members was to start with the GAA’s Official Guide – the Rule Book. For most GAA people, the GAA’s Official Guide is a bit like an IKEA manual, you only ever read it after you’ve done something wrong, and Gavin happily admitted the same.
When you read Rule 1.8 of the Official Guide on “Amateur Status”, you see the size of the task ahead for Hassan’s committee. Rule 1.8 has, in effect, six subsections and arguably five of them have been wilfully ignored at all levels of the GAA for quite some time.
The first subsection is that “the Association is an Amateur Association.” The GAA when it looks at itself in the mirror likes to see itself as snow white, the fairest of them all; in reality, its skin is pockmarked with payments and payoffs and you can see this plainly from the second sub-section of Rule 1.8 which mandates: “A player, team, official or member shall not accept payment in cash or in kind in conjunction with the playing of Gaelic Games.”
The remaining subsections are either evaded (a player etc shall not contract itself/themselves to any agent other than those officially approved by Central Council); circumvented (expenses shall not exceed the standard rates laid down by the Central Council) or ignored (members may not participate in full-time training).
The penalty for breach of Rule 1.8 is 24 weeks' suspension or expulsion, a penalty which is like a gym membership in February: it sounded good at the time, and you keep meaning to use it, but you know you never will, and after a while you are too embarrassed to bother to even cancel it.
The very fact that an amateur status committee has been established shows that any pretence that Rule 1.8 is being enforced or is even enforceable, has been abandoned.
Pragmatically, the favoured approach seems to be to bring some form of transparency to the various payments and monies that flow in or around the GAA at inter county level.
Another option would be to move directly to some form of semi-professional or even a fully professional inter-county game. The problem with this is that the GAA, particularly a fully integrated one, could not sustain it. Across the four codes, that would mean maintaining, in theory, 128 teams – not possible.
In any event, what underwrites professional sports leagues across the world is the money generated from broadcasting deals, which are in decline globally. The GAA’s national broadcasting pool is as shallow as a puddle. The only way that you could maintain a professional code in the GAA would be to drastically cut and merge the number of county teams – anyone for the Red Hands (previously Derry and Tyrone) vs the Slieve Gullions (Armagh v Down) in the Northern Conference championship final?
The favoured option may, in any event, mean that the GAA is moving towards some sort of a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) on how the game is to be administered - that is, an agreement between Croke Park, the counties, and the GPA, as the player representatives. In that CBA, various licencing and financial commitments would have to be given by counties as to spending on county teams – details and declarations on sponsorships, private donations, supporters’ clubs etc as well as information on monies paid to managers, coaches, physios and the menagerie that is the modern inter-county backroom. The current GPA-GAA agreement would also have to be integrated.
Presumably the idea would be to put caps on spending to try and obtain some sort of competitive balance between counties.
There are three issues with this approach. The first is that, as rugby shows, this will become a runaway train. Once a sport moves to a non-amateur status, there is no going back. What were once relatively informal arrangements now become formalistic and legalistic. Sacking a manager who has had a poor league campaign is a fraught enough process now for a county board, but terminating mid-season the contract of a manager employed by that board might end with a visit to the Workplace Relations Commission.
The second issue is that of enforcement. If a licensing or CBA system is brought in, who will police and enforce it. Country AFL here in Australia has such a system in place but feelings on it are mixed – lots of clubs see a budgetary cap as a floor for their ambitions not a ceiling, and rorts, as they say in Australia, are common.
All of the above is not to say that some sort of transparent, regulatory system cannot be drafted. It could, but the more fundamental question is do we want it?
The word amateur comes with a negative connotation – an inexpert, someone lacking proficiency, someone who is not fully committed. And yet that is entirely the opposite of the vast majority who play, coach and support the GAA in various ways.
Maybe the most radical solution is a simple one – to start by replacing the word amateur in the GAA’s Rule book with voluntary. Volunteers willingly and with full consent give of their time to the GAA. A recent academic study from Sheffield measured the GAA’s contribution to Ireland in the millions but in a way that study misses the entire point of the Association: few sports volunteers give of their time to the GAA so that it can be valued; most give of their time to the GAA because it represents their values.