A TIERED All-Ireland Football Championship will heap more financial pressure on already struggling smaller counties, warns Fermanagh vice-chairman Phil Flanagan.
Calls for the current all-in model to be split along more competitive lines have grown over recent years, but Tempo clubman Flanagan argues that slotting counties like Fermanagh into a ‘B’ Championship will increase the length of their seasons and therefore multiply the financial burdens they can barely cope with now.
“There is a huge clamour from some people with the GAA to introduce a tiered All-Ireland Championship, all that would do would be extend the inter-county calendar for the so-called weaker teams,” said Flanagan.
“If you had an All-Ireland ‘B’ competition and the final was played on the same day as the All-Ireland final, that really means that Division Three or Four teams would have to play from November to August (the following year) or the first weekend of September.
“The length of the inter-county season is too long. From a financial perspective, counties can’t afford the length of the season, maybe some bigger counties – where there are substantial sponsorship agreements or where there is funding coming from other sources - can justify that but smaller counties are genuinely struggling to sustain the length of the season.”
Flanagan rejected the suggestion that a tiered championship would mean more competitive games for Fermanagh which might attract bigger crowds and offset some of the costs involved with extending the county’s season.
“’I don’t want to talk about other counties, but Derry played Offaly a couple of weeks ago and there wasn’t 600 people at it,” he said, referring to a Division Three game at Celtic Park.
“How much attention or coverage does Division Thee or Division Four football get? Not much - the RTE highlights programme very rarely features anything outside the top two divisions.
“The Irish News covers all the Ulster counties but outside that there is very little talk about Division Three or Four and that’s the same thing that would happen with a tiered Championship – people wouldn’t talk about it.
“People think the Leagues are great because Division One teams are playing each other every single week and they can watch it on TV or read about them. They receive all the coverage in terms of review and preview, but there’s very few people outside the counties talking about the lower divisions.”
Last year the Fermanagh county board’s expenditure came close to half-a-million Euros. That sum represents a huge fundraising effort, but it’s less than a third of what Cork, Dublin and Mayo were able to invest.
“The sheer scale of running a county set-up is massive,” Flanagan explained.
“It’s a huge burden on all of us in a voluntary organisation to bring in money.
“We are very lucky that we have hugely loyal supporters and Patsy Treacy is the longest-serving county sponsor in the whole of Ireland. It’s a huge thing for us that we have a loyal sponsor but if you look around the county, Dublin have a multi-million investment package with AIG, Leitrim are sponsored by the Bush Hotel, Roscommon appear to be sponsored by their own supporters’ club…
“There’s no way that is fair or equitable – the teams that are going well receive all of the sponsorship and the teams that are struggling to compete, struggling to survive financially get very, very little.
“All that is doing is widening the gap between teams that are successful and teams that are struggling to compete.”
