Paul Rouse: Avoiding relegation is as satisfying - and important to a county - as securing silverware
Offaly manager John Maughan - his side will battle for their Division Two survival against Cork on Sunday afternoon.
Here’s a statement of the blindingly obvious: it is a massive weekend for Gaelic football. And it is a peculiar kind of massive, because actually winning the league pales in importance besides managing to avoid relegation.
In football, five teams live in danger of relegation from Division One: Dublin, Monaghan, Donegal, Kildare and the All-Ireland champions Tyrone could conceivably end up back in Division Two.
There are similar vital contests down the divisions. Indeed, they are even more significant contests in the other divisions, to the extent of being season-defining.
You could make a case (albeit a slim one in some instances) for any of those five Division One relegation contenders winning their provincial championships, and being competitive in the All-Ireland championship.
The same cannot be said for those who are at the bottom of divisions two and three.
In Division Two, Down have already been relegated and a straight shoot-out between Offaly and Cork in Tullamore will decide who joins them.
And in Division Three, two from Laois, Longford and Wicklow will be relegated.
These are matches that are fundamental to the immediate future of the game in each county.
Across the great majority of sporting competitions in the world, relegation is an essential feature.
The most famous exception are the major sports leagues in America where the four most popular team sports – baseball, basketball, ice hockey and American football – have fixed memberships.
It may be that teams relocate from one city to another, or the number of teams in a league is expanded to allow for a new franchise to be added, but relegation does not exist.
But the general rules that permit of relegation across most of the world are essential to the energy that drives sport.
This is partly because of its flipside: promotion. The possibility of promotion make it feasible (as least in theory) to imagine that a team at the bottom of a league structure can progress through divisions and make it to the top of any given sport.
And it has, of course, happened in practice, not just been imagined in theory. Almost always, it involves the investment of huge sums of money by a benefactor.
For example, in England Blackburn Rovers spent most of the 1970s and 1980s in the (old) second and third divisions of the English League. The club was then bought by a local steelworkers owner, Jack Walker, who was a devoted Rovers fan and who then invested a fortune in turning the team into the best in England.
His two signature moments were the appointment of Kenny Dalglish as manager in 1991, followed by the signing of the best young striker in England, Alan Shearer, for an English record fee in 1992.
With other players added in the months that followed, Blackburn Rovers came fourth in 1993, second in 1994, and then won the League in 1995.
The scenes of raw emotion that greeted that victory were the greatest in the club’s history. They had done what had seemed impossible just half-a-decade earlier. And had particularly seemed impossible to a small city (or, maybe, better called a large town) whose heyday had been in the last decades of the nineteenth century when it was a thriving centre of cotton production.
Obviously, in modern soccer being a steel magnate would not cut it; an owner who wished to take an obscure team to win the Premier League would have to have access to the sort of riches that flow from oil-based sovereign wealth, international hedgefunds, or private investment companies whose willingness to spend will have to reach into the billions.
The great current example in Gaelic football of a team that has travelled through the divisions and is now competing at the top end of the League is Armagh. As recently as 2018, Armagh were in Division Three of the National Football League. They are now in contention to make the Division One League Final and are genuine contenders to win the Ulster Championship.
In the process, it is now largely forgotten that three of Kieran McGeeney’s first four seasons in charge of Armagh were spent in Division Three.
Derry, too, have progressed from Division Four and stand this weekend on the cusp of Division One. They may not make it this weekend, but stand a good chance of doing so over the next few years, even if they do fall short in 2022.
This is progress that has been made possible by good management, good resourcing and a basic capacity to build momentum over a period of years.
The crowds who have attended Armagh’s league matches this spring are testimony to the galvanising impact that promotion can have on a county.
By contrast, relegation routinely demoralises. To return briefly to Blackburn Rovers, by the end of the 1990s, they had been relegated from the Premier League. In the two decades since then, Rovers – under new ownership – have fallen as low as League One, and have not been in the Premier League for a decade. They almost never sell out the stadium and the photographs of the 1995 Premier League winning team hang as yellowing reminders of what once was real but now seems impossible.
It is well established just how acute the cuts that follow relegation from the Premier League ordinarily are. This is something that is usually referenced in terms of the inevitable sales of players, or the loss of sponsorship money, or the reduction in wages.
It also costs people all around a club their jobs. When Sunderland were fighting relegation from the Premier League in 2016, their Italian goalkeeper Vito Mannone spoke with passion and clarity on the impact of what was coming their way.
Most of all, he was aware that it meant people who worked at the club would inevitably lose their jobs. These were people who worked in catering and administration and other jobs. Mannone was emotional as he laid bare the cuts that he understood would surely come.
Out in the wider community around Premier League clubs, the impact is also real. Philip Banyard and Mark Shevlin conducted a study across two recently relegated Premier League clubs for an article entitled “Responses of football fans to relegation of their team from the English Premier League: PTS?” which was published in The Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine (2001).
What the study showed was that relegation of the team they supported brought “a clinically significant degree of psychological distress for the majority of respondents.”
This manifest itself, among other ways, in responses “such as sickness from work, reduced productivity, declining sales of local and national newspapers, and increased admission to hospital with self-injury.” How temporary the nature of the adverse response might be was unclear from the research.
It was in this pain of relegation that the converse of Blackburn Rovers’ supporters’ ecstasy in success can be felt.
For counties whose teams face relegation battles on Sunday, the best thing that can be wished for is a sense of perspective. It is a massive weekend, of course. And it really matters. Except that the wheel of sport never stops turning. And another massive weekend is only a revolution away. And then another.
