The GAA All Ireland Football Championship will have a new look and feel to it next year after the introduction of a second-tier competition was voted in at a special GAA Congress in Pairc Uí Chaoimh, Cork on Saturday.

This is regarded as a ‘tweak’ to the three-year experiment of the ‘Super 8’s whereby the Quarterfinals are played on a round-robin basis.

The full results of the Fixture task Force Review Group will be put to Congress next February when longer-term decisions are taken on the shape of the GAA season but this tournament will go ahead next summer regardless.

It will be open to teams who have finished the next Allianz League season having been in or relegated to Divisions Three and Four and who have not appeared in their Provincial Final.

The main interest is likely to focus on Cork who will need to either gain promotion from Division Three in the coming months or beat Kerry in their Munster Semi-Final to avoid being one of the counties competing in the new tournament rather than for the Sam Maguire which they have won seven times, the most recent being in 2010, and in which they have played more Finals than any county bar Dublin and Kerry.

The motion was passed with 75.5 % of delegates voting in favour and the work has already begun on planning how the tournament will look and how it will be covered.

The teams involved will be known as soon as the Finals of the Provincial Championships have been determined. That will be as early as the first week of June and there will be a maximum of sixteen teams giving rise to four rounds of knock out games.

If they were played at two-week intervals it could mean the competition taking place starting on the weekend of June 21st and concluding before the end of July.

It would avoid a clash with the second tier Hurling Championship for the Joe McDonagh Cup which concludes at the end of June but whose participants are already known from the previous year.

A major element of the success will be how the competition is seen to be treated by the GAA and the media.

GAA President John Horan suggested he would like to see the Semi-Finals and Finals played at Croke Park and that discussions had begun over coverage of games on RTÉ.

There are only so many windows that can be given over to GAA coverage and next summer will include the Tokyo Olympic Games which run from late July through early August.

That might lead to a tighter run of playoffs to get to a final the weekend before the Olympics which would make the coverage easier but those discussions will run for a while yet.

The name of the tournament is expected to be confirmed in the coming weeks as well.

The new competition was described as an evolution rather than a revolution by GAA Director General Tom Ryan and it will come to pass without interrupting the regular rhythm of the Championship season for teams at the top end of the spectrum.

It will offer a chance to counties to extend their own interest in the summer and it is really for them, their players and their fans, that the change has been brought about.

It is understood that all of the different proposals from the fixture review Group make reference to a second-tier competition which should mean it will have time to find its feet and grow in stature.



Image Credit Inpho.ie Laszlo Geczso