The 2026 provincial football championship draws are set to take place in Croke Park on Thursday at 7pm.
The draws will be streamed on the GAA’s online channels in a departure from the traditional format in which the draws were broadcast live on RTÉ.
The draws for this year’s provincial championships took place on October 12th and were broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1.
The GAA hope the later date and new streaming format will help increase interest in the draws.
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This year saw Jim McGuinness guide Donegal from the preliminary round to win the Ulster football title – beating Derry, Monaghan, Down and Armagh on their way to retaining the Anglo Celt Cup.
As teams drawn in the preliminary round are exempt from the opening stage for the following two years, Donegal, Derry, Monaghan and Cavan are guaranteed a quarter-final starting point for 2026. The teams in the draw for the preliminary round are Tyrone, Armagh, Down, Antrim and Fermanagh.
In Leinster, Louth will be out to defend the Delaney Cup for the first time since the late 1950s, though there are no shortage of contenders lining up to knock the Wee County off their perch.
Dublin are tipped to be the team to do it, now under the management of Ger Brennan who guided Louth to this year’s historic provincial success.
The four semi-finalists from this year’s Leinster Championship – Louth, Meath, Dublin and Kildare – will go straight to the quarter-final stages next season. The remaining seven counties – Offaly, Laois, Wicklow, Westmeath, Longford, Carlow and Wexford – will be drawn into three first-round pairings.
Meanwhile, the draw for the 2026 Munster Football Championship has been the focus of much debate and controversy in recent months.
In July, it emerged that Munster officials were planning to introduce a seeding system for the 2026 draw based on the two highest ranked teams in the previous year’s National League standings (Kerry and Cork), giving them a bye to opposite sides of the semi-final stages.
However, those plans sparked kickback and with the threat of boycotts mooted, Munster GAA agreed to postpone the seeding changes for one year.
The draw for will now proceed on the basis of this year’s Munster finalists (Kerry and Clare) receiving a bye to the semi-finals, as has been the method used for the last decade. It is to be an open semi-final draw, meaning Kerry and Clare could meet in the province’s last four.
Cork, Tipperary, Limerick and Waterford will be in the quarter-final pot.
In Connacht, the two quarter-final pairings are already predetermined as Mayo will travel to face London on April 11th while it is Roscommon’s year to take on New York at Gaelic Park.
The game in New York is fixed for April 12th and will mark the first time in a decade that the Rossies have made the trip to the Bronx after their 2021 fixture was cancelled due to Covid.
No draws are required for the Leinster and Munster Senior Hurling Championships as the round-robin fixtures are scheduled annually on a rotating basis.
