It is increasingly likely that we will see a tiered Football Championship in place by next summer.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio One's Morning Ireland, GAA president John Horan - who has championed the idea of a tiered championship throughout his reign - outlined a timeline for its introduction.
"When you look at the championships in the last few weeks, you see great local derbies and great matches and then you see some games a little bit too big a gap in the actual result," said Horan.
With the big gap in result, if you look at the [football qualifier] draw we’ve made this morning, you see a large number of Divison 3 and 4 teams are already in the qualifier section.
Our hope will be at the next central council meeting in June to bring forward proposals to look at the introduction of a Tier 2 Championship for those teams in Division 3 and 4.
There’s an appetite out there within the organisation to go ahead with a Tier 2 Championship and now is the time to grab that while the appetite is out there and I think we will possibly get it through at Central Council.
If we do we’ll call a Special Congress in September/October to look at putting it forward to maybe having it introduced next year.
Horan also announced the formation of a fixtures review committee which will be chaired by former St Sylvesters chairman Eddie Sullivan.
Horan hopes that the committee will formulate three proposals to improve a problematic GAA calendar. The deadline for those proposals is late October or early November. They will then be brought to Congress in February.
Photo by Eóin Noonan/Sportsfile
