While club football in Kerry is perhaps the highest standard in the entire country, events during the 2023 season have resulted in many calling for major changes to be made to the format of their championship moving forward.
East Kerry would recently claim their fourth county title in five years, defeating Mid Kerry in a repeat of last year's final. However, some are calling into question the future of divisional sides in the competition.
Kerry's Senior Championship features 16 clubs: eight senior teams and eight divisional sides. Those eight divisional sides are guaranteed their place in the competition each season, meaning one of the other eight clubs are relegated every year. In 2023, it was Kerins O'Rahilly's who went down despite winning a Munster club title in 2022.
With that in mind, and with a number of divisional sides having performed poorly in recent times, some are calling for changes to the structure of the championship moving forward.
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Pat Spillane suggest changes to Kerry championship
A number of possibilities have been put forward as to how changes in Kerry's championship would work. Some have suggested that divisional sides be removed altogether, while Paudie Clifford said perhaps some sort of qualification process could be put in place for those teams.
Pat Spillane has an alternative suggestion.
Writing in the Sunday World, he said that it was clear that changes were needed to the divisional sides in Kerry. As a result, he put forward two major alterations he would make to the championship in the county moving forward.
We now have a problem with the divisions.
First of all there is a huge disparity in standards between the eight divisions. We’ve created a monster in East Kerry: eight clubs, four of whom are intermediate, and a subs’ bench with everyone having played county football.
Mid Kerry isn’t far behind; they have six teams, four of whom are intermediate. Between the two, there is about 70pc of the population of rural Kerry involved.
Indeed, in last Sunday’s final, the 14 clubs represented in the two divisional teams amounts to one quarter of the clubs in Kerry...
I can see that there is a need for radical change.
The Kerry senior championship is no longer fit for purpose. We need a minimum of 12 clubs to be competing at senior.
The divisions need to be redrawn and certainly one shouldn’t have a scenario where we have four intermediate clubs playing in a division, as we saw last Sunday with both teams.
Why? Because the majority of intermediate clubs in Kerry are capable of playing senior club football and are as good as senior clubs in most counties.
The suggestion to add more senior clubs to the Kerry championship is something that has been put forward by quite a few prominent voices in the county and it seems like a good idea.
The redrawing of divisional sides is not something we have seen raised elsewhere.
It does seem clear that both East Kerry and Mid Kerry have a crazy pool of players to choose from as currently constructed. As Spillane points out, Tralee divisional side St Brendan's will also be a formidable outfit with the likes of Austin Stacks, Kerin O'Rahilly's, and John Mitchells included in their playing pool.
It seems likely that tweaks will be coming to the Kerry championship over the coming years. It just remains to be seen what format those changes will come in.
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