In Salthill on Sunday, there’ll be more premium coaches along the line than you’d see in the Broadstone depot. Galway get their 2026 season under way against Mayo and along with all the usual clannish fulminations out west, the dugouts teem with subplots. Concentrate now, this might get a little tangled.
In the Galway corner we have Pádraic Joyce, beginning his seventh season as manager to the Tribes. On his coaching staff is Mickey Graham, who did five years as Cavan manager and then had an ill-starred fortnight in charge of Leitrim. Before he hotfooted it down to Galway, Graham took over the Leitrim gig from Andy Moran, now the Mayo manager.
Moran was Leitrim manager for three seasons before leaving at the end of 2024, whereupon he was snapped up by Monaghan to be their coach under manager Gabriel Bannigan. He left after one season, to manage his native county. One of his first calls on getting the Mayo gig was to Paddy Tally, freshly out of intercounty management with Derry and also formerly the Down manager. Moran asked Tally to be his coach, a role Tally had previously filled with Tyrone, Down, Galway and Kerry.
Keeping up? We’ve a bit to go yet. Speaking of Kerry, Jack O’Connor starts the new season with long-standing coach Cian O’Neill on the sideline against Roscommon. O’Neill was formerly the Kildare manager, of course, back in the days of Newbridge Or Nowhere. In the here and now, Kildare have not one but two former intercounty managers on their coaching staff, with Davy Burke (Wicklow, Roscommon) and Aidan O’Rourke (Louth, Donegal) supporting second-year manager Brian Flanagan.
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We could go on but maybe you’re starting to get the picture. Let’s go LinkedIn on it altogether and give the helicopter view. In all, exactly a quarter of the counties setting out on this year’s football league list former intercounty managers among their coaching staff. That’s nine coaches in eight counties in three divisions, bringing a total of 46 years of intercounty management experience to the table.
This, it should hardly need saying, isn’t the usual way of things. The traffic pretty much always goes in the other direction. You do your time as a coach and then, when the time (or, gadzooks, the money) is right, you step up and get your initials stitched into the Bainisteoir’s gilet somewhere. Traditionally, it has only been the very rare fish that swims back upstream.
Not this time around. No fewer than four of the 2025 managing class took their places over the winter as coaches for 2026. They were all coming off the back of varying degrees of success as chief bottle-washers. One way or another, they were immediately in demand.
Burke led Roscommon to promotion to Division One last year before an ultimately disappointing summer. Tally had no luck with Derry, who seemed a day late and a dollar short all year. Tony McEntee (Sligo) and Andy McEntee (Antrim) couldn’t do the miles any more, in both the literal and figurative sense.
None of them had to wait long for the phone to ring. Tally stepped down from the Derry job on July 10th and was announced as Mayo coach on August 11th. Tony McEntee finished up after five years in Sligo in mid-June and was in situ as Down coach in late August. Burke’s time off the intercounty hamster wheel amounted to less than 60 days, between leaving Roscommon and hitching up with his native Kildare.
There was still heat in the late summer when Bannigan’s number flashed up on Andy McEntee’s phone. The Monaghan manager had pulled off a bit of a coup in his first year by getting Moran on board as coach but now that Mayo had tugged on the elastic to bring him back west, Bannigan was scouting for a replacement. McEntee had done three years as the top man in Antrim and six years before that with Meath. The planets aligned.
“I was casual enough about what was going to come next after Antrim,” McEntee says. “I had a couple of other interesting calls but when Gabriel rang me I was more than happy with the idea of going to Monaghan. I would always have had an admiration for them, in the way they’ve been able to do so well with a small population and all that.
“Things had come to a natural conclusion in Antrim. I was open-minded, I hadn’t decided one way or the other what I was going to do next. Once Gabriel asked, I definitely liked the idea because I like the way they approach things.”
Every manager goes about the gig in different ways but if there’s a common thread running through virtually all managerial careers, it’s the gradual erosion of the amount of actual coaching they do over time. When Andy McEntee took over Meath in the wake of leading Ballyboden to the club All-Ireland in 2016, he did a lot of coaching initially. He was deeply involved in the sessions, bringing what had worked with Boden into the Meath set-up.
But as the years passed and the job expanded, that time on the grass with the players got squeezed. There was no way around it. So much of being an intercounty manager these days involves dealing with extraneous concerns, all of which are vital in their own small way to the running of the operation.
Coaching players demands their full attention. They’re less likely to give it if they don’t feel they have yours. McEntee spent long enough with everybody’s problems ultimately being his to solve. Now he has one thing to fixate on.
“The big difference is that you get to concentrate purely on football matters,” says McEntee. “You spend most of your time dealing with football only, instead of all the things that county managers have to deal with. The truth of the matter is that when you’re the manager, you could have anything up to 60 people under you.
“That’s players, backroom, county board, whatever. That’s 60 people that you’re answerable to or that you’re trying to take control of, within reason. You’re trying to deal with a lot of issues on the pitch and off the pitch. It takes a lot of organising and it takes an awful lot of time. I’m finding now that I’m focusing on the football only, I’d say it has cut the time that I have to commit to it at least in half.
“Now, is it on your mind most of the time? It is. But it’s a singular thing. You’re able to zero in on training sessions and tactics and what bits and pieces you need to work on. You don’t have to deal with the things that in a lot of cases are probably out of your control anyway.”
That’s never more true than in these early weeks of the year. If any of the ex-intercounty managers harbour residual pangs of envy of the men in the big jobs, January has a way of quashing them. The start of the league means the paying public gets to see their team at the worst possible time – players are injured, the colleges are demanding their pound of flesh, the weather turns league games into lotteries. All of it falls on the manager.
When the results are read out on the news this weekend, nobody is attaching them to the lad doing the coaching. Unless it goes well, of course. In which case, the coach gets the hosannas and, at best, the manager is applauded for his shrewd delegation. No fainter praise can there be.
McEntee reckons it’s probably no more than a coincidence that so many ex-managers are suddenly coaching teams. Kevin Walsh in Cork and Cian O’Neill in Kerry have been at it a long time now. Emmet O’Donnell in Westmeath is more than a decade removed from his time as Offaly manager. Tally’s reputation has been made far more as a backroom guru than as a number one.
Maybe the most interesting one is Tony McEntee in Down. He has been a coach before, with Mayo back in the mid-2010s and indeed there were reports last summer that he was in contention to take over from Kevin McStay. But once Moran was called home, there was little prospect of McEntee being idle for long in or around Ulster.
It could well be that Conor Laverty went and got him before Kieran McGeeney could fill the hole left by Kieran Donaghy. Donegal had a possible vacancy too after Luke Barrett went to Derry. Either way, Tony McEntee brings a sharp edge that makes Down the most dangerous up-and-comers outside the top two divisions.
The grid is filling up before the green light goes and the season gets under way. Now more than ever, the pit-crews are filled with serious expertise. All itching and scratching for the extra edge. Loving it too.
“This is the enjoyable bit,” says Andy McEntee. “Getting out and being with the players and really focusing on the football. You’re on the pitch, you’re trying to get your ideas across and you have that session to do it. You’re still thinking about it afterwards but you’re getting to think about it alone.”
No wonder there’s so many of them at it.
