O’Shea: Pay for play and franchises will happen

Mayo’s Aidan O’Shea believes the inter-county GAA landscape is destined for seismic changes with smaller and weaker counties amalgamating and franchises emerging where players are paid for their services.

O’Shea was speaking on the back of tweets he posted last week where he welcomed the Sky broadcasting deal with the GAA while questioning why players remained outside the loop when it came to the money surrounding the modern game. He also added that the arrival of Sky would force RTÉ to up its game and claimed that the state broadcaster had become “lazy” due to their long-time monopoly of rights up to 2008.

“It’s going to go there eventually,” O’Shea said when asked at yesterday’s launch of the Electric Ireland 2014 Minor All-Ireland championships about the possibility of professionalism. “It’s not going to happen in my lifetime, but it will eventually. We all know that. Eventually. We are not going to have 32 counties playing Gaelic football. It’s just not viable. It might be 20, 30, 40 years away but that’s the way it has to go. The way our country is set up, the way our population is, you are not going to have 32 teams.