[caption id="attachment_69362" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Gaelic football has amateur stars, like these from Roscommon and Mayo playing at Dr. Hyde Park, paying customers and clandestinely paid managers."]
Name the sport where the best players get paid absolutely nothing for turning out in venues packed to the rafters with obsessive fans cheering them on. Here's a clue. The biggest matches are broadcast live on national television, generating serious revenue for the association and the network. The only other people making real money from this enterprise are the coaches, some of whom get paid much more than the industrial wage for lending their expertise. These often iconic managerial figures routinely switch allegiances between teams every few years, usually amplifying their price tag when they do so. All the while the characters they are cajoling excellence from get no monetary reward for their efforts.
It's a trick question because there are actually two answers. In the entire planet, the above description applies only to the GAA in Ireland and the National Collegiate Athletic Association in America. An ocean may divide them but the NCAA, the body supervising the vast conglomerate that is university sport, and most notably, grid-iron and basketball in the US, has an awful lot in common with the denizens of Croke Park. For starters, nowhere else is the disparity between what the coaches earn and what the players aren't allowed to earn so marked as in the codes supervised by these two associations.
Of course, the NCAA justify this enormous anomaly by pointing out that their players are on scholarships that are often worth as much as $250,000 over the course of four years at a prestigious university. The GAA can make no such claims. The fact the inter-county managers are drawing down money (huge money in some cases) while those they are trying to manage aren’t and can’t has always been kind of ridiculous. That it has taken the authorities until this past week to even begin seriously tackling the issue says much about how slowly the wheels of the association can sometimes turn.
In a classically bureaucratic move, the GAA have started to deal with the problem by publishing a lengthy discussion document about what must now be referred to as “unregulated payments to managers”. Aside from them taking 14 months to publish this, the other most bizarre part of the whole production was the fact the authors postulated that the GAA now has three options when it comes to the sport’s worst-kept secret. They can ignore the carry-on altogether as they have done so studiously for years. Failing that, they can try to make it somehow quasi-legal, crafting an Irish solution to an Irish problem. Or they could crack down upon it with full force, using the amateur status rules of which this is such an obvious contravention.
The latter is probably the least likely option to be taken because everybody knows these payments have traditionally been made in the most labyrinthine and clandestine ways. A high-profile manager travelling 150 miles each way to look after a team never gets paid directly out of the county board coffers. The money always comes through an intermediary, be it through the mechanism of a supporters’ club or a businessman with a passion for the game and a desire to see his county do well. By keeping the money at one step beyond, the county boards have always been able to maintain plausible deniability and to ensure proving who got what is nearly impossible.
Yet, the payments have continued and mushroomed, something borne out by so many county boards pleading poverty of late. Indeed, it’s laughable that the GAA’s working paper proposes dealing with the inter-county managers. What of the club managers and coaches who are being well paid for their efforts too? Surely, you can’t have one rule for the inter-county set and another for those farther down the food chain. Isn’t the very essence of the association that all members should be treated equally?
Now, there is no denying that club teams and county teams have benefitted from the input of professional coaches over the years. While there is plenty of evidence of high-profile characters going into off-Broadway locations and having enduring impacts on communities, there are also lots of clubs which have been ripped off by charlatans who’ve taken the money and given little back. You don’t have to go very far to hear horror stories of men with big coaching reputations arriving into small clubs and showing no interest in giving their employers any sort of value for money.
To figure out what the GAA may do here, it might be instructive to look at how they’ve handled monetary problems of the past. For a couple of decades, inter-county stars cashed in their chips each year by making lucrative trips to various American cities to line out for teams in the championships there. It was only when the practice became so widespread and such an obvious contravention of the rules (in the early 1990s, the flights to New York of a Friday morning were often a who’s who of hurling and Gaelic football) that Croke Park finally cracked down.
As with the payments to county managers, the authorities couldn’t prove anybody was being paid so they merely regulated the practice out of existence, implementing new rules that ended the days of the long weekends in the States. Could something similar be done here? Don’t hold your breath. There are many influential folk who believe the GAA must introduce a system that acknowledges the fact so many managers are being paid.
The question is how can this be done without angering players? From time to time, the NCAA system comes under the most pressure when players start to realize that they are the only ones involved who didn’t get any cash reward for their input. Lately, some have even talked of suing the NCAA to stop so many others making money off their image rights. In a time when so many hurlers and Gaelic footballers are feeling the pinch off the field, will all of them be willing to accept the man in charge of the squad is getting €50,000 a year while they get zilch? Somehow, we doubt it.
