Football eats the summer

Football's rule changes have revitalised a sport on life support, leaving hurling in its wake.

For most of the last decade, the relationship between the GAA’s two codes was firmly implied.

Hurling had the superiority. Hurling had the poetry, the montages, the British tourists stumbling upon the final on BBC and for at least one afternoon, falling under the spell of the clash of the ash.

Football, meanwhile, got the life-support think pieces. The criticism and labels of “puke football”. Football was fourteen men behind the ball, a wing-back doing forty lateral handpasses, and an annual symposium on What Can Be Done About Football, held roughly every August, resolving almost nothing.

Last Wednesday, tickets for both football semi-finals went on sale and vanished in minutes. Not the final, but the semi-finals. Mayo–Louth on Saturday, Dublin–Kerry on Sunday, two full houses at 82,000 people in Dublin’s Croke Park on the same weekend, and the GAA itself admitting it had probably never seen demand like it for a semi-final weekend. A week earlier, the hurling semi-finals, which had Galway dismantling Cork and Limerick versus Clare, came and went at the same venue with two fantastic ties but far from the golden ticket that the football managed to slide into people's chocolate bars.

Read this back to a football supporter of, say, 2019 vintage and they’d assume you were describing a different sport. In a sense you would be.

The reason has a name so beige it could only be Irish sport: the Football Review Committee. Jim Gavin’s FRC took a game that had been coached into a defensive armadillo and performed surgery on it in full view of everyone; the two-point arc that made long-range kicking a weapon again, the kickout rules that stopped goalkeepers dinking the ball ten yards to a corner-back with a paunch, and the 4v3 structure that legislated the blanket defence out of existence by simply requiring teams to leave forwards in the forward line. Sixty-one motions passed at Special Congress, refined again for 2026, and the result is a sport where scores are up, the ball is willingly sent forward, and a looping kick from distance has become a beautiful part of the game.

We should pause on how unusual this is. The recent history of sport is a museum of governing bodies breaking things: FIFA inflating a World Cup until it doesn’t fit in one country, broadcasters chopping fixtures into content slurry, rugby litigating the tackle beyond recognition and shoving everything else behind a paywall.

The FRC is the rare counter-example - an institution that looked at its product, found what wasn’t working, and adjusted it. It wasn’t rebrands, music after goals or fancy light shows. They simply changed the rules of the actual game, and the actual game got better, and people have responded by buying every ticket in the building. It turns out the growth hack was bettering the sport.

And what the rules unlocked, this summer delivered in spades. Several blockbuster performances across a festival of summer football only rivalled by the tournament across the pond. Louth in a semi-final. Mayo back in a final for the first time since 2021 after putting a bonkers 3-23 on the scoreboard. Kerry seeing off a resurging Dublin by a point in a battle that, for various reasons, has dominated the storylines heading into All-Ireland Hurling final week.

Kerry–Mayo to finish it all off, a final overloaded with attacking talent and tactical intrigue, with forty years of scar tissue on top of it. The rules cracked open the door for the sport to flourish and the teams to play the game refreshed, without handcuffs.

None of this means hurling has got worse. Galway–Limerick on Sunday will be a fine final and Croke Park will be packed to the rafters.

But the aristocrat’s problem is that it has spent twenty years being told it’s perfect, and nothing curdles quite like being told you’re perfect. The same provincial structure funneling the same four or five counties toward the same weekend. A championship where half the country is mathematically eliminated before the evenings get long and the sun hardens the turf. Hurling people watched football’s rule revolution from the high horse, arms folded, secure in the knowledge that their game needed no such vulgarity - and now football has stolen the summer out of their shirt pocket.

The GAA has already hinted the FRC experience “may inform” its thinking on hurling. That sentence should make hurling supporters nervous and hopeful in equal measure, because the lesson of the football project isn’t that hurling needs another arc painted on fields around the country. The outcome is that no game is above the question. Football supporters spent a decade being told the sport’s decline was cultural, irreversible, something in the coaching water that would take years to unwind. It just needed a framework and powers-that-be capable enough of delivering the required kiss of life.

It’s been a difficult year for hurling, and as someone from that side of the parish that’s hard to admit, as we look on at envy at our football comrades who feast on the spoils and dominate the attention spans and goodwill of supports who continue to crawl out from dark caverns, having soured on a sport that had become almost impossible to enjoy.

Football spent well over ten years as the GAA’s problem child. One committee later, it’s the hottest ticket in town.