No county chairman ever lost his audience giving out about the Aussie Rules crowd. Patrick O’Sullivan in Kerry brought it up this week at the county convention, rounding on the number of Australian Football League (AFL) scouts sniffing about Kerry’s minor and under-20 teams. You could almost hear the delegates knocking on their tables in support. Would have been a bad night to be a kookaburra floating around Tralee.
“They [the scouts, not the kookaburras] come selling a professional sport to our younger players,” O’Sullivan said. “Over the last couple of years, two of our players have gone to the AFL under rookie contracts, the first being Rob Monahan and the other being Cillian Burke. They have also contacted seven more of our young future stars.
“The association has to take some action regarding the AFL’s constant scrutiny of our younger stars in Ireland. Procedures will have to be put in place where players cannot be taken without contributing to the club and counties who give so much to the development of these players.”
O’Sullivan is no rabble-rouser. If you were grading the county chairmen all around the country in terms of their more madcap inclinations, he would sit comfortably on the saner end of the spectrum. He is a steady hand on the tiller in a county where football consumes everything and everyone.
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Kerry’s sense of grievance here is, on the face of it, perfectly understandable. Since 2009, seven Kerry players have been signed by AFL clubs. They haven’t all played, they haven’t all stayed. But they all left Kerry at a time when it was hoped locally that they would kick on in their intercounty careers. Seven is a lot, in this context — the most any other county has waved off in that time has been four.
The numbers are worth laying out, just for scale. Over the past 15 years, 45 players from 21 Irish counties have been signed by Aussie Rules clubs. After Kerry’s seven, Kildare and Derry lost four apiece. Mayo, Westmeath and Down lost three. Everyone else lost two or fewer.
But then again, “lost” is a bit of a misleading word here — of the 45, only 20 went on to play a game in Australia. Some came home straight away, others stayed a year or two before deciding it wasn’t for them. Eighteen returned to Ireland without playing a game, including three from Kerry.
In a decade-and-a-half, only 15 Irish players have made it to double figures in terms of AFL appearances. Only five have played at least 50 games. On the flipside, 20 of that list of 45 players came home and played intercounty football. A dozen of them played this summer. Two — Ross McQuillan of Armagh and Galway’s Cillian McDaid — played in the All-Ireland final.
So for all the airtime this issue gets, the actual impact of it is probably a bit overstated. Let’s say that in any given year, there are somewhere in the region of 1,000 intercounty footballers lacing up their boots in Ireland. Losing an average of three of them per season to the AFL is small enough potatoes, keenly and all as each one is felt in their locale. Particularly when about half of them come back to play within a few years anyway.
But there’s another layer to this over which it is worth taking extra care. The Kerry chairman would presumably have a fair level of support around the country for his idea of forcing AFL clubs to contribute when they come and spirit these young footballers away. It can’t just be in Kerry where this sticks in the craw.
And so the notion of clubs and counties being compensated for their loss is bound to be an attractive one. These players have all had years of Gaelic football coaching, only for professional clubs with revenues in the millions to come and snap up the finished product. There’s nothing for nothing in professional sport so why should the GAA be shy about demanding their taste? It’s a persuasive argument, put like that.
It’s wrong though. Plain and simple. Even if the main motivation is for it to be a deterrent to the AFL clubs rather than to make any actual money, it’s still changing the nature of all those years of coaching at a stroke. Immediately, you’re making an official admission that your interest in these players is the worth of the finished product.
Whether that worth is to your club or county in the championship or to a professional organisation in Melbourne is immaterial. What matters is that you are no longer coaching players to mould them into the best version of themselves. You are doing it to extract value.
That’s not what the GAA should be about. Coaching kids can’t just be an exercise in improving their kicking so that they’ll win you an All-Ireland. It’s about being a positive influence in their life, helping them along whatever road suits them. If that’s becoming an intercounty footballer, fantastic. If it’s being one of the three young men a year in the whole country who goes to play football in Australia, amazing.
Coach the person. That’s all you can do. Who they become is up to them. These players don’t owe anybody an intercounty career — other than themselves if they so choose. Creating barriers to their development so that they dutifully fulfil the home-based destiny you’ve decided for them is a terrible road for the GAA to consider going down.
Once you start that, you are treating players as tradeable commodities. In effect, you are no different to the rapacious professional sports you are trying to keep at bay. That changes everything.
Step easy on this one, lads.
