Players are the GAA’s crown jewels says GPA chief Farrell

Dessie's not one to let the opportunity for an argument pass by, and no doubt got his buddy and biographer, Potty to help him pen and a swift and acidic response to Paddy Heaney's piece (Time has come for GPA to stop asking for more).

Earlier this year Paraic Duffy pleaded for a better relationship between the GPA and those that do not share the same views, reminding the GPA that it is not helpful for them to "use dismissive or intemperate language towards those who hold a contrary view on player-related issues". That call certainly fell on deaf ears, even though Dessie says, he "tried to temper his response".

Dessie makes it clear that any formal recognition of the GPA will have to involve the GAA bankrolling the players' association so that it can apply for "an expanded package of player welfare services". Dessie's wish list of employment programmes, health services and education initiatives would make Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro proud. One further step on the slippery slope to professionalism.

Except Dessie thinks he can cloak the intention as a guise to protect Gaelic's amateur status. "We can safeguard our amateur status by ensuring we achieve excellence in the area of welfare" Dessie boldly claims. Because if you don't he warns "this has the potential to set us on another collision course with the GAA regarding sponsorship, TV and image rights". That's code for we want control over the money generated from these rights and we will strike if we don't get our way.

Most alarmingly, and this betrays Dessie's true vision for the GAA, he sees the GAA as a "product" which we must make the "best in the market" to compete with other codes.

Lord help us all.

The GAA will never let it happen

Across all the views of the pro- and the anti- grants camps a strong point of agreement would appear to be that professionalism would be bad, if not ruinous, for the GAA. The consequences of professionalism don't have to be explained: GAA members appear to be well-informed of what they are already. But, what they don't agree on is the proximity and the degree of danger. Those for the grant, but against professionalism, are not worried because, they say, the GAA and its members will never let that happen. 

It doesn't matter if Dessie and the GPA see the grant as an interim measure--as just a "battle" in the "war" for professionalism. It doesn't matter if the next generation of GPA members are reared in an Association with diluted ideals and principles regarding payments for players, because, as the logic seems to go, when the GAA is faced with the clear and present danger of professionalism, the members will rise-up to defeat it.  

That's why the players can be appeased with with a few bob. The GAA will ultimately decide; they are, afterall in charge, or at least should be. That's why the anti-grants movement can be dismissed with a sneer by Messrs. O'Rourke and Breheny as a bunch of non-sensical anarchists. The GAA should be the only arbitrator of its own affairs and appeals to courts and non-GAA bodies by upstarts should be eradicated. 

Yes they should. That's exactly the point the anti-grant group is trying to make! 

"Who is running the show?", indeed. 

With the grant  in place, the answer will not be the GAA, as some, if not most, naively believe. 

By introducing the grant the GAA will no longer control its own destiny. It's hands will be tied. Just like UEFA's, just like FIFA's, and just like every other sporting organisation that has been ensarled by the four freedoms of the European Union (free movement of goods, services, labour and capital). It is the European Commission and the European Court of Justice that will now decide the GAA's fate. The precedents are there --Walrave, Donà, Bosman, Deliège (the one GAA members and grant advocates should fear) Kolpak, Meca-Medina etc.-; that's what Of One Belief is desperately trying to point out. 

UEFA and FIFA would like to protect football. They would like to be able to regulate their own sport. They would like to tackle the number of foreigner players playing in domestic competitions. They can't. Freedom of movement. They would like to address the competitive imbalance in and between leagues. They can't. EU Competition law.  They've been lobbying to get the principle of the "specificity" of sport enshrined in the EU treaties to balance the influence of the EU on the game and regain some control, but have so far failed. And, while the EU has stopped short of treating sport as "just another business" there is no mistaking that it is the forces of the free market that reign supreme in football. While some, like the Premier League, are happy to exploit this to their advantage, not everyone thinks that greed is good.

 

So while the danger is not yet clear for some, it is present. Don't think that the GAA will be cocooned away from the implications of the EU law. The grant establishes the link with the EU legal framework and all it will take is one disgruntled party from inside our own ranks to exploit it.

And, sadly, we never seem to be short of them. 

Why you should oppose the GAA strike - Reason No. 2

The amateur ethic of the GAA doubles as a community ethic. Compensation to players will create a divide between the elite and the grassroots. The most fundamental unit of GAA competition is the club side. The local roots feed up to the counties, creating a unity of purpose that makes the association great. The people that make the tea and sandwiches, cut the grass, line the pitch and coach the kids on a Saturday morning have a direct connection to the players that play in Croke Park in front of 80,000 in an All-Ireland. They're one and the same. That's where the strength of the Association lies. Why ruin it?

Compensation to players would break the "virtuous circle" upon which the GAA is built. What do I mean by virtuous circle? Well, think about the cycle of development in the GAA. Coaches, volunteers and supporters play and support their teams at club level. The success of the clubs and the development of talent is taken to the next level by the county teams, where the best players from clubs are invited to display their talents on a bigger stage. The people from the clubs who facilitated their development are happy to pay their hard earned money to attend these games because they played a part in making the players, supporting them and putting in place the stadia. There's a direct link, whether or not you come from the same club as the "Gooch" or any other inter-county player, you played a part in their development. Most importantly, you know that the money you pay to see the inter-county games will be re-invested in all levels of the game, thereby allowing the cycle of development to start anew. It's an unbroken circle. Compensation for players will break the cycle. Compensation for players will mean that the money generated at the top will no longer find its way back to the bottom.

Look what has happened with since rugby turned professional in Ireland. Supposedly, it has produced a "golden generation" of players making the best international team ever, not to mention successful provincial sides, Leinster and Munster. Scrape this veneer (as the performance at the Rugby World Cup demonstrated) and what has professionalism done for the game in Ireland? As Tom McGurk (Rugby pays price of professionalism) writes, rugby in Ireland is now in a terrible state. "The paucity of playing members and the incessant cost demands has hit the clubs hard in the last decade. Many of Ireland's once most famous rugby clubs are a mere shadow of their former selves. Still largely surviving on the goodwill of the golden oldies, many that once put our five or six junior 15s out on a Saturday, can now barely scrape two or three teams together."

Look at the gap between the players and the rest of the community in soccer. Take the Premier League for example. The Premier League works very hard through the Football Foundation to ensure that they are seen to be part of the community and that everyone is benefitting from the team. Why do they do this? Because the natural link between the Premier League's and the communities where they are based has been broken. The money and the benefits of the big clubs don't find their way down to the lower level of the game to the people who support the clubs. It has to be artificially created through a form of corporate social responsibility.

Professional sport creates a dynamic whereby most of the money generated goes toward the professional code of the game which caters for less than 1% of the players. We do not want a situation where a significant and ever-increasing proportion of GAA income goes not to grass roots, clubs, underage support and development, but to pay players. The GAA supports the game at all levels.

There's a difference between the GAA and the sports entertainment business. It's not a business. It's not set up as a business. That's what distinguishes it from other sports. Let's fight to keep it that way.