Is GAA management becoming the preserve of those able to retire?

Colm O’Rourke’s disclosure on Thursday that he was taking early retirement came as part of a growing trend. Because of the increasing demands of managing intercounty teams, more and more managers are being found among those at an age when it’s possible to retire.

“I’m retiring from my job to concentrate on Meath,” said O’Rourke during the week. “I’m taking time out from everything, my only focus next year is the Meath team.

“I think the demands of this job are too great to try and hold down some of the employment I have had in the past, so I will be giving up everything to concentrate on this. I have always felt when you are in for something you are in fully or not at all.”

He joins Jack O’Connor, manager of the current All-Ireland champions Kerry, who attributed the ability and space to take up the Kildare job in 2019 to his own early retirement from teaching and also during the past year after the return to his own county, spoke of the advantages of not being distracted by a full-time job.

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“I’m in the lucky position that I’m retired and I have the time and the energy to put into it. But I literally can’t envisage somebody with a demanding full-time job doing this. I don’t think you’d be able to do either job properly.”

New Mayo manager Kevin McStay has also acknowledged that he is “essentially retired” and has “the time to give to it”.

All three have reached the age of 60 and from a point, when O’Connor was appointed a year ago, where it was hard to think of All-Ireland-winning managers, who had done so in their 60s, the current champions are in the charge of such a person – and two of this season’s highest-profile appointments are of a similar age.

This partly reflects the demands of the position, which have become significant and are probably a factor in the hiring of new managers this year taking so long.

Even at this stage, at least three months after nearly all teams have exited the 2022 championship, there are still two Division One counties, Donegal and Roscommon, without an appointment formally made.

One former intercounty manager said that he had gone from considering it “an honour to be involved” to feeling frustrated at all of the administration that goes with it, much of it sorting out pay and budgets.

“You’re trying to recruit, say, S+C guys but some of them are more interested in what being involved with a county team will do for their marketability among clubs, which is ‘where the money is’.

“It’s like a business with about 70 employees if you include players and the development group most counties have [O’Rourke mentioned putting one together at his media conference]. Even though they aren’t getting paid, they need to be looked after if they have issues they need to raise.

“I was lucky in that I had flexibility and could plan out my day but they often turned out to be very long days when there was training that evening.”

That flexibility had been a previous phenomenon in the prevalence of schoolteachers among managers. They wouldn’t be impressed to be told that they had great summer holidays but would accept that they have greater control over their time when schools are on vacation.

The idea of paying managers was floated as an option in former DG Páraic Duffy’s discussion document 10 years ago. That scenario was justified in the following passage:

“The team manager is the person who gives the most in time and effort, who undergoes the most in pressure and stress, who guides the playing team and leads the management team, and whose contribution is the most wide-ranging, comprehensive and indispensable to all aspects of the preparation and performance of the county team.

“This commitment, and the lack of formal recompense for the function by the GAA, has been the most decisive factor in bringing into being the practice of unregulated payments to managers.

“We must ask ourselves if it is either reasonable or realistic to expect that the person who fulfils this critical and time-consuming leadership can be expected to do so on an entirely voluntary basis.”

The GAA in 2012 took the decision to maintain amateurism and enforce the rules. Needless to say, that didn’t change things very much even if these days, after the recent establishment of ‘audit and risk subcommittees’ on every county board, there is likely to be a growing focus on the practice of under-the-counter payments.

It’s not unknown for managerial candidates to seek work cover so that they can in effect have sabbaticals from their jobs but, as originally feared by Duffy, the result of opting to clamp down on payments hasn’t affected the reality and the GAA suffers by being seen to treat breach of its rules with impunity.

Now things are happening from the opposite perspective: managers are going full-time by clearing space at the end of their working careers. Something had to give.