This is how the conversation goes. Johnny Green is at home watching the TV when his phone rings. It’s an unknown number, but that’s not unusual: As a former inter-county star working in sales, he’s used to random callers looking to talk about the products he’s selling as well as the most recent games.
And he keeps a separate phone for family members in any case. He’s also used to random callers making contact for a very specific reason. In any event, he answers.
“Is this Johnny? Paddy Brown here, how are you doing?” There’s some chit-chat first, only to be expected. Johnny’s years of meeting people after matches all over the country have given him a line of bland generalities he can trot out with little effort until Paddy gets to the point, which he eventually does.
“Look, Johnny, I’m involved with the Rovers here, as you might be aware.”
By saying he’s “involved” rather than chairman or secretary, Paddy is making a subtle point.
He’s indicating that, while he is empowered to speak on that club’s behalf, there is also a level of deniability when it comes to the next phase of the conversation.
That may prove important at a future club AGM but, for the moment, that doesn’t detain the two lads because by introducing this subtle acknowledgement into the chat, Paddy is building to the purpose of his call.
“We’re looking around for a coach. A good one. We’re going well, but we want to drive it on. Anyway, we were thinking of Billy White and I know you know him well, sure the two of ye played together long enough.”
Now we’re getting to it.
Johnny talks about his old teammate Billy for a bit. Yes, he’s a good coach, and yes, he’s available. In fact, it just so happens that Johnny and Billy are meeting up for a game of golf at the weekend.
Paddy knows their golf plans well, of course, having done his due diligence, but Johnny isn’t going to upset the decorum of the call by acknowledging that.
There are specific roles to play here after all.
“Look,” says Johnny after a minute or two of singing his golf partner’s praises when planning training drills and making crucial in-game switches, “he’s going to want to know what’s involved, obviously.”
Paddy knows what this means as soon as it’s said, and he comes out with it straight: “18. Use of a car.”
“Hm,” says Johnny, looking out of his window at the car sitting in his own driveway. The licence plate shows the car was registered a whole eight years ago. Then he waits.
“Of course”, says Paddy, “if you were interested yourself it would be more.” “Let me think about it,” says Johnny. “I have your number here anyway.”
Paddy says no problem and, when he hangs up, he texts the club chairman who deputed him to make the call, telling him the man they want is interested alright.
By the end of the week, Rovers have their new coach. Johnny, of course.
Just a formality
The discussion about Johnny’s old team-mate and his undoubted coaching ability — even if his availability for the job in question was never absolutely and categorically confirmed — was just a formality.
The kind of courtship ritual David Attenborough usually describes in an excited whisper when recording his voiceovers.
Billy was just one of the possible coaches used as an opening gambit by a club intent on landing a bigger fish. That’s an understood part of the pantomime.
Johnny won’t be sharing the details of that conversation with anyone, least of all Billy. Nor will Paddy, come to that. Neither would be interested in drawing too much attention to the ritual.
In fact, both may suffer from a sort of localised amnesia if they’re ever quizzed on timelines and details of the appointment. “Approaches” is about as specific as anyone is likely to get.
Don’t feel too sorry for Billy, though. If he was in serious contention for the job of coaching the Rovers, he’ll figure in another conversation sooner or later. Someone will ask loaded questions about a coach of his acquaintance, then the chat will turn, and a few months later he’ll be able to upgrade his car. Just like Johnny.
Welcome to the strange world of the paid GAA manager, where cash incentives, and perks such as apartment use and car models are the grammar of interaction.
“Twilight” was my first impulse when it came to describing this world, but it hardly does justice to this mysterious economy — which exists in the shadows away from, yet parallel to, real life.
This parallel economy will, if nothing else, plunge you into some very unusual conversations
For instance, you may find yourself discussing a small rural club that is somehow — somehow! — paying a coach almost €30,000 to take on its sole adult team, and justifying the expenditure on the basis that this coach is bringing in a strength and conditioning trainer as well. Which, therefore, means two management figures for the price of one. Kind of.
Or you may end up chatting to a friend of yours from a club that is looking for a specific individual who is well known for his coaching prowess. Said individual may have quoted a figure of over €300 a night to train your mate’s club, but there is a significant proviso.
The club will have to organise training for Tuesdays and Thursdays, because the individual concerned is already committed to a club in a different county on Monday and Wednesday evenings.
In order for him to pocket €1,200 in cash every week, the two clubs’ training sessions can’t clash.
Or you may end up talking idly to a club officer about his club’s management team, a conversation in which you wonder what a particular person you glimpsed on the sideline at a match is contributing to the club.
The response may be a terse one, with the officer saying — through gritted teeth — that the players wanted this person along as a sports psychologist, that the officer has yet to see him at a training session, that his contribution in the dressing room before games appears limited to roaring “focus!” at random intervals...
But, the officer adds, the individual concerned gets an envelope with cash every Friday evening at the clubhouse.
As does the actual manager of the club team, who is a relative of the “sports psychologist”.
All of these scenarios may be true, but there’s a catch-22 of sorts at work. It’s impossible to report on these matters in the media for the simple reason that they’re practically impossible to prove.
It’s accepted that clubs all over Ireland are paying managers, but standing that up in a court of law would defeat Woodward and Bernstein.
At least they had a paper trail that could be followed, while GAA club management must be the last remaining commercial space in western Europe where cash is still king.
By the same token, it’s possible to speculate as wildly as one likes about payment amounts. How can any of these coaches correct the record?
“How dare you say I got €40,000 from that club when I only got €30,000” is not a defence one hears, for fairly obvious reasons to do with the Revenue Commissioners’ lack of humour about undisclosed earnings.
Lest there be any misconceptions, paid managers are a cancer in the GAA. That’s what Christy Cooney said when he was president of the association, and he was absolutely correct.
The paid manager runs contrary to the ethos of the GAA in both the letter and spirit of the law.
It undercuts the meaning of a club and also points out that club’s shortcomings if it cannot produce a manager from its own ranks.
Taking a wider view, the paid manager is a hypocrite whose exploitation of a club, or a county, is a fundamental contradiction of the GAA’s commitment to community and voluntarism: It is both bare-faced extortion and shameless exploitation, and the paid manager’s tenure always taints the ecosystem he leaves behind.
This betrayal of the GAA’s core principles has now been accepted to the point that media coverage routinely cites extensions, contracts, and deals when writing about managers, terms more appropriate to professional sport.
In what other sphere of Irish life would so many people not only break the law in full view, but do so under the hot glare of publicity?
Nomination time
All over Ireland, when the mercenary has moved onto his next stop on the circuit and the club holds its AGM, some version of this practice can be heard when the top table seeks nominations from the floor for manager of the club’s top team.
“Chairman,” someone will say, “with all due respect, how do you expect one of us to do for nothing what you paid the last man thousands of euro to do?”
Almost inevitably, it was Dara Ó Cinnéide who crystallised the conversation about paid managers: “Recently enough, I was chatting to a few lads in the club and we were discussing a management team for the seniors.
“One of the lads said: ‘Would you not just go outside the club?’
“And I said we could quite easily, but it would break my heart because, if we did, I’d have to cut all ties with the club after all those years. I’d walk away because I’d be betraying everything I believe.
“In fairness, the chap who asked then said: ‘Fair enough, I get it.’
“My point to him was that we could quite easily get a very good coach or manager — someone who might very well win a title with the team — but I also felt I’d have to live with that decision for the rest of my life. And I didn’t want to reach a point where I didn’t believe in the club: I admitted to him I could get emotional about it, but that there were certain principles worth holding.”
It was interesting that no contributor to this book disagreed about the existence of the paid club manager
Indeed, for almost all, it was a given, an accepted fact of life in the GAA. Yet, how can there be a situation where the manager in the dressing room is being paid while the people playing for him are not?
In October 2024 , GAA president Jarlath Burns made some comments which became the newest set text on this issue when he was quoted in the Irish Examiner: “What does it mean to be a GAA inter-county player in 2024, and what does it mean to be a manager?
“I think there will be a debate on whether we should put managers on contract, because it is nearly a full-time job, the amount of accountability is there. Even when you are winning, there can be difficulty listening to criticism.”
“It’s a huge issue,” said Prof Jack Anderson, a specialist in sports law at the University of Melbourne (and one-time secretary of the GAA’s Disputes Resolution Authority).
“Managers are being paid at inter-county level, that’s just being straightforward. They are. I think Jarlath’s comments were focused on the inter-county side, and they’re an acknowledgment of that reality, but the obvious retort is what you’ve said. How can it just be the manager who’s being paid?
“There are all sorts of additional twists to this. I remember starting out in the eighties and, at club AGMs, lads would be saying ‘we need an outside manager to come in’ and all of that, but back then it was generally a manager or a coach coming in on his own.
“He’d probably get two selectors from the club and drive on.
“Now it’s different, because even at club level a manager comes in with a coach, a strength and conditioning guy. While at inter-county level, you see the size of the backroom teams. At all levels you hear that emphasised: It’s not the manager, it’s the team with him, the ‘management package’, however you want to phrase that.
“Where you may end up is with a budget for inter-county teams, and managers may have to work within that budget and declare every bit of it accordingly.
“We’ve seen that in Australia with semi-professional teams in the AFL [Australian Football League]. With the GAA, you may see a cap introduced with ways around it — say if a manager or one of the selectors is a games development officer within the county as well, then that could be taken into consideration with the cap. I think we could go in that direction.
“The issue then, of course, is how you cap spending, and what happens if a county breaches that cap?
“Will the GAA have the balls to go and punish that county properly and show there are consequences?
“That’s done in other sports but, to enforce the cap, an organisation may need an internal service checking these things and auditing spending.
“Would that be better than what we have now? What is there at present is certainly a sham amateurism, and sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
- More Than A Game: The GAA And Where It’s Going by Michael Moynihan is published by Gill Books
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