The phone call came at the right time for Kevin McStay. He had finished his stint in charge of the Mayo footballers, which hadn’t ended well and in the way of the county, was exacerbated by an ill-mannered communique, stating the management had been “relieved of their roles”.
A delegate to the subsequent county board meeting compared Mayo GAA to the Burke family as “the gift that keeps giving for the media”.
McStay had been recovering from a health scare, having taken ill at training in May, and had stepped back from the team involvement while the championship came to an end in the last minute against Donegal.
When the call came, his health was happily recovered and the unpleasantness with Mayo at least fading in the rear-view mirror. On the other end of the phone was GAA president Jarlath Burns, offering him the job of chairing the football expert advisory group.
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This body would take over from the hardest act to follow since the Rolling Stones blanched in the wings while James Brown was putting in a particularly energetic set at the 1964 TAMI show – Jim Gavin’s Football Review Committee (FRC).
“The phone call with Jarlath was completely out of the blue,” he remembers. “I had recovered pretty fully from my health issues, although the disappointment with how the Mayo situation had ended as well as the aftermath was still fairly raw.
“I was taking a break from football and this was like a new chapter. It has given my lifetime involvement a new lease of life. I wouldn’t like it to have finished the way it did last June.”
McStay hasn’t commented publicly on the end of the affair in Mayo and doesn’t intend to do so in an interview designed to launch his new committee, which concerns the future of football – and not generating headlines from his own past.
He is conscious that the advisory group is effectively to act as trustees of the FRC project.
Typical of its thoroughness, the FRC had left a roadmap of the way forward. In its final report, it presented its last recommendations after 67 meetings, an exhaustive consultation process and analysis of more than 5,000 submissions.
[ All-Ireland club final gave a perfect snapshot of football’s big improvementOpens in new window ]
This took the form of 19 additional recommendations, which it was suggested be further investigated. The final two were administrative.
One, that the Games Intelligence Unit (GIU), which in 11 reports in 2025 analysed in statistical detail the impact of the new FRC rules trialled during the year, be placed on a standing basis. Two, a successor committee be appointed to continue the work of monitoring the game, which is where McStay came in.
“I believe that it’s a committee that can definitely develop and continue the work of Jim and the FRC. Giving the GIU permanent status was another important measure because I don’t think our committee could function properly without the data. It was certainly important to me in accepting the role.”
As well as establishing the GIU on a permanent basis, the GAA has expanded its remit to include hurling, under the lead of Dr Michael McKay of the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland and a research associate at the University of Ulster.
The phone call with Jarlath was completely out of the blue
— Kevin McStay
“When you read the FRC literature and go through it, it really is a phenomenal piece of work, superb. But they couldn’t hang around to test their work because it’d be a committee that’d go on forever.
“The new committee has the data resources of two national leagues, this and last year. We have the 2025 championship and, of course, 2024 as a benchmark.”
“We” is the new advisory group, featuring: Johnny Bradley, project lead on the GIU [football]; All-Ireland referee David Coldrick; former Galway player and manager and Connacht games manager John Tobin; former Kerry Footballer of the Year Maurice Fitzgerald; Monaghan’s multi-All Star pundit Conor McManus; former FRC member, Westmeath head of operations and former Croke Park referees manager Patrick Doherty and servicing officer Séamus Kenny, who fulfilled the same role for the FRC.
McStay himself played for Mayo in an All-Ireland final, won an All Star and after his playing career was a leading pundit on RTÉ’s Sunday Game as well as managing Roscommon club St Brigid’s to an All-Ireland and then the county to a Connacht title. He also took Mayo to a league title.
The FRC rule changes transformed football. A panel of 1,207 agreed to take part in evaluating the impact of the changes. They were asked to rate the game of football on a scale from one to five, before and after the introduction of the new or enhanced rules. Their ratings went up from an average of 3.6 to 4.8.
“A more enjoyable game to play and watch” was the original mission statement. A Gaelic Players Association survey found that among intercounty players, 95 per cent said that their playing experience had been improved.
In the FRC final report, just over 90 per cent of club players surveyed, agreed.
For all the hosannas ringing out for the improved game, McStay is aware that change is a dynamic process.
“Jim and the committee have done an incredible service and I see our job as maintaining that legacy. But is there room for improvement? Definitely. The FRC had 18 months or two years to observe and analyse and tweak but it was obvious there was going to have to be bits of work done thereafter. The 19 recommendations in the final report demonstrate that.”
The role of football’s expert advisory group (FEAG) is just that, advisory. It will liaise with the Standing Committee on the Playing Rules to bring forward proposals. McStay has already spoken to the SCPR chair, Liam Keane, about the guide rails ahead.
“Liam’s committee have done a fairly detailed analysis of the 19 FRC recommendations, and farmed them out to the most appropriate committee or unit in Croke Park. Some have fallen into the referee’s wheelbarrow, others into the president’s. Nine of them have fallen into ours, which are predominantly around the playing rules but we’ll have a slightly wider lens than that, I imagine.
“Nothing major is going to happen until after we have reviewed this season but between the jigs and the reels, our timeline is tight enough. We will have to come up with recommendations for the 2027 championship and have our work pretty much completed and over to Liam Keane by the end of September, early October.”
There may be calls to intervene before then. A level of disquiet has been reached about the end of play protocol, which ordains that the hooter signals the immediate conclusion of play, as opposed to that which governed last year’s championship when the ball had to go dead after the hooter sounded before play was ended.
Between the jigs and the reels, our timeline is tight enough
— Kevin McStay
Endless handpassing routines accompanied that latter approach, as teams tried to engineer scores before half-time or more frantically, at the end if a winning score was needed.
Reverting to the original, immediate termination was recommended in the final FRC report: “the game should end when the hooter sounds – unless the ball is in flight or a free-kick is being taken, including 45s and line balls.”
That original rule was changed halfway through the 2025 league after controversies had arisen over whether scores had happened before or after the hooter had sounded.
The adoption of the so-called rugby protocol – keeping the ball in play until it goes dead once the time signal has sounded – was recommended by the Central Competitions Control Committee lest “reputational damage” be done to the game.
The reversion has created its own issues, most vividly illustrated at the end of the league Division Two final when Meath, to protect a two-point lead, tactically fouled Cork to run down the clock. James Conlon pulled down Maurice Shanley after a free had been awarded.
The Meath replacement was sinbinned but referee Brendan Griffin didn’t award the 50-metre advance for delaying the free. Cork manager John Cleary afterwards protested the situation and added: “What else would you do then only keep fouling, keep fouling and that’s what’s going to continue, I think, as the championship comes in.”
The protocol won’t be changed before the provincial football championships begin this weekend but if the scenario outlined by Cleary becomes a recurrent reality, there will have to be an emergency review.
As a Central Council regulation, the clock does not require a motion to congress to change, unlike actual playing rules.
As a person that loves Gaelic games and Gaelic football, I mean, the game was broken
— Kevin McStay
Many people can identify when football stopped working for them. Armagh’s Aaron Kernan said that he had noticed once at a match that conversations were breaking out among the spectators during another endless bout of handpassing.
For McStay, the epiphany was an All-Ireland group match against Louth in 2023. Mayo had beaten Kerry in Tralee the previous week and were struggling to replicate that performance.
“As a person that loves Gaelic games and Gaelic football, I mean, the game was broken. I’d seen that first-hand as a manager and a coach myself with massed defence and the ability in those days to bring 15 back.
“I suppose you could call it the apocalypse. It was a scorching hot day in Castlebar and the game was beginning to get very, very tight. We were finding it so difficult to break down the mass defence.
“The Louth free-kicker Sam Mulroy had about a 25-metre free, that he certainly wasn’t going to miss. The other 13 players, and the goalkeeper obviously, as he was taking the kick, were just outside their 45. And they were all behind the halfway, but the majority of them were actually behind the 45 line.
“As the ball went over – it was obviously a lovely kick – he didn’t even look to see it go over the bar. He turned around and sprinted back as well.”
All of the unease experienced by stakeholders in the game had to be crystallised into something empirical if it was to be addressed.
The FRC’s widespread consultation created a snapshot of what people wanted and when the subsequent recommendations were introduced, it was the GIU, who monitored the impact.
“That’s your data: 63 per cent of kickouts were contested in the championship last year, up 24 per cent from the previous year. Referees are telling us it’s so much easier to referee, discipline, eight reds versus 25 reds in 2024, and so on. It challenges your own perceptions as well – like a 45 per cent increase on goal attempts. I wouldn’t really have said that, but that’s the GIU telling you.”
Not that there is no space for personal views. McStay has a range of opinions on how the rules are progressing but there will be a process for discussion among the group plus the latest data to update current and trending impacts.
Any rule ... has to pass the club versus county test: what’s that going to look like down in Belmullet?
— Kevin McStay
“I ask all of the members, ‘what are you hearing now for the last two or three months?’ which should give a list of three or four things to get started.”
Then there is the consideration needed for application at club level, which has been generally well received, even if there were high-profile controversies in last year’s senior club championships.
“Any rule we come up with then has to pass the club versus county test: what’s that going to look like down in Belmullet?”
One of the FRC’s great strengths was not biting off more than it could chew. A number of issues were not taken on, possibly because anything around which consensus could not be built might have been damaging for the overall package.
The least enthusiastically received rule change was the introduction of the hooter/clock and that was supported by three-quarters of the delegates at last year’s special congress.
Run through the 19 parting recommendations and there is still material to be evaluated.
The handpass is probably the one problem that was largely avoided by the FRC, at least partly because it was originally hoped that the new rules would reorientate football from a horizontal to a vertical plane. Handpass to kicked pass ratios continued, however, to climb.
Among the 19 proposals for evaluation are the introduction of restrictions at under-15 level, forbidding two successive hand passes and an “over and back” regulation that would prevent a ball being played back into a team’s own half once they had carried it into the opposition’s.
“The biggest difficulty in any type of handpass restriction is the close-quarter stuff, the little pop pass in and around the large rectangle or the small rectangle. What you call in rugby the lovely soft hand that opens up a goal chance, like Michael Langan’s ball to Conor O’Donnell in the league final. That came after a handpass from Hugh McFadden.
“I think perhaps a lot of committees thought about it long and hard and then left it to one side because it’s such a difficult thing to fix. But there has been a lot of disappointment over the last number of years around why are they doing nothing to limit the handpass – but it is complex.
“A lot of people, myself included, would have said that the ‘over and back’ seemed like something that probably should have made it through. Apparently, in the famously called sandbox games, it worked very well. So, it merits consideration.”
There are a few other areas that he looks forward to covering with the committee: the handpass score and revisiting the handpass back to the goalkeeper, which he doesn’t like in any circumstances.
“The reason they left it in is the unintended consequence of the full back, the corner back being caught in the small rectangle. And he can’t go anywhere. If you take the handpass to the goalie out of the game, he’s kicking it out over the end line on purpose. Which looks terrible.”
Everything in terms of our roadmap is very clear. I’ll be hoping we do that justice
— Kevin McStay
He also takes issue with the penalising of sideline misbehaviour with a 13-metre free.
“I’m not sure that the misconduct of anybody outside the pitch should affect the scoreboard. I have a strong enough feeling about that but it does need to be weighed against the fact that sideline conduct has dramatically improved.”
A supporter of revisiting the four-point goal, he believes that he was complicit in killing the idea, another look at which is included among the 19 recommendations. The night the original rule “enhancements” were trialled in an interprovincial competition, McStay was among the Connacht back room.
A barrage of four-point goals settled the match against Leinster before half-time. Despite protests that a barrage of three-point goals wouldn’t have been a major improvement, the impact stirred up sufficient negativity to bury the concept.
The template for exhaustive briefing and updating was unprecedentedly successful for a GAA committee and McStay is keen to follow that example.
“We’re very grateful to the FRC for really lining the pitch for us. Everything in terms of our roadmap is very clear. I’ll be hoping we do that justice. I’m confident we will. Football can never be allowed to decline into such a state again.”
