THE GPA may have gotten a result of sorts last week, but the devil was in the detail of what they actually wanted.
An incremental increase of the government’s grant scheme will see the current annual figure of €900,000 that is given to inter-county footballers and hurlers mushroom over three years, stretching to €3m a year in 2018.
Now, if you take that in isolation, there’s nobody going to be retiring to a villa in Spain off it in three years time.
Just as nobody will get rich off the summer’s GAA/GPA deal to increase the mileage rate and introduce a nutrition allowance.
Combine the three and the bank manager still won’t be rolling out the red carpet every time they see you coming down the Main Street.
But all those fears that the GAA is heading to semi-professionalism must surely now be dead, because we’re already there.
In 2015, the average wage for a player plying their trade as a semi-professional in the world of Irish soccer was €4,000 per year.
It’s not going to pay the mortgage off or feed the kids but it will get Christmas over a bit easier. That is the world of semi-professionalism. That’s why they have other jobs.
By 2018, when you combine the new mileage rate, nutritional funding and the government grant, GAA players at the top end in football and hurling will stand to earn in the region of €4,000-a-year. The top-line grant for players will be €2,227 per year.
An average estimate of the mileage rate, based on the €1.5m cap being broken down across 64 county squads, offers up to €930 a year.
And taking a similar average of the nutritional allowance, which will be capped at €1.2m a year, offers a potential earning of €760.
Add the three together and you have €3,917 a year for some amateur Gaelic footballers, just €83 short of the earning of a semi-professional soccer player.
The differing status of the two allows the GAA, and its close cousin the GPA, to function. The FAI too is also helped out financially by the Irish government - they were given €2.7m in 2015 - but little of their income from anywhere ever trickles as far as the grassroots.
Their grand plan for distribution of the €11m garnered by Ireland’s good run at Euro 2016 was to give each of its senior clubs €5,000.
In the whirlpool of Irish football, that would have lasted a few weeks, and wouldn’t have gone near the pockets of players.
“No player chooses to play professional football in Ireland as a way of becoming rich and famous,” said PFAI secretary Stephen McGuinness last year.
Nobody chooses to play GAA to become rich but there are opportunities for fame. And with those come endorsement deals. With those come more money.
The GPA not getting the €7m a year that they had been seeking from Sport Ireland may well have been the saving grace of the GAA’s amateur status.
Had they gotten that figure, based on the distribution plan for their €3m per year, the potential income for a player would have been bumped to just under €7,000 per annum.
It’s often said that these incomes are protecting players from being ‘out of pocket to play for their county’. Yet the mileage rate in particular equates to more.
The customs advisory rate on the cost of fuel in Britain is 13 pence per mile for diesel, and 21 pence for petrol. The average car in the UK gets 38 miles to the gallon, which works out at, surprise, just over 13p per mile based on the price of fuel last Sunday.
Yet, the new mileage rate under the GAA/GPA deal equates to 54 pence per mile in the north. Making 41p on every mile you drive is not covering your costs. It’s making a profit. The more successful your county, the more miles you drive, and the more money you make.
That’s not to mention players sharing a car to training and claiming the mileage individually (shhhh).
Then there’s the nutritional expenses. What happens to that money in a situation where county boards provide their players with food?
After that there are boot vouchers and free gloves and the supply of so much kit they can wrap half of it up and give it to the girlfriend for Christmas.
So the question has to be asked: Are inter-county players actually left out of pocket by playing GAA at all?
The last time I brought up this subject I was politely reminded by one former All-Ireland winner that the money was ‘reimbursement’ and not payment.
They look pretty similar to me. There is no other label for these new deals than semi-professionalism.
It’s not begrudgery. It’s just that what was once the association’s umbilical cord has been left dangling like the finest piece of string.
The GPA has been burrowing down this hole for 15 years and every time you think they’ve hit a rock, they find more earth to claw at.
They have created an elitism that has driven a wedge between those who get paid for their commitment (inter-county players) from those who don’t (club players).
The GPA, just like the GAA, is a business. Unashamedly so. Revenue next year is expected to touch €8million.
Eight million euro.
If they had wanted semi-professional status, they would have been very close to achieving it by now. Dessie Farrell did say in his book, Tangled Up In Blue, that he wanted that, but changed his mind as amateurism gradually became lucrative enough to do.
The GAA has long since been a professional organisation, with its legions of staff between headquarters, the provincial bodies and Croke Park.
Last year, they spent almost €4.2m paying staff. The total spent on administrative costs was just under €9.5m.
But the GAA publishes its accounts annually. The money comes in and it goes out, and each year it’s presented to the media and Páraic Duffy will answer questions on it.
There is a level of transparency about the GAA’s financial dealings. There is no transparency about what the GPA spends its income on.
There is no disputing that their player development services are indeed valuable to players but aside from what the GAA or the government tell us about where the money goes, we know little of exactly how and where their income is spent.
The new deal will see them present their accounts annually to Central Council, but not publicly. Why?
It’s a long time since the lines between amateur and semi-professional began to blur. The line has been washed away.
Inter-county players have been semi-professional in their deeds for a while, but it’s now matched by what they receive.
