Munster counties spending average €737k more on their teams than Leinster's

Total inter-county team expenditure expected to rise to close to €46m.

MUNSTER SPENDING: Munster counties are now spending an average €737,000 more preparing their teams than those in Leinster. Picture: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile

Munster counties are now spending an average €737,000 more preparing their teams than those in Leinster.

The total team expenditure for Leinster’s 12 counties in 2025 came to €15.381 million, an increase of €916,432 on the previous year. However, the jump was less than that recorded among Munster’s six counties where the figure rose by €1.071m to €12.11m. The average outlay for a Munster county is €2.018m and in Leinster it is €1.281m.

Munster’s figures mark a stark difference to 2018, the first year of the province’s SHC round-robin format, when their total team costs came to €6.7m. In seven years, an increase of almost 80% has been recorded.

Four Munster counties – Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Tipperary – invested more on their representative sides than those in Leinster whereas only Dublin (€1.968m) spent more than Waterford (€1.596m).

Wexford, the second biggest spenders in Leinster with €1.559m, jumped ahead of Clare whose bills last year dropped by close to €65,000 from €1.566m in their All-Ireland SHC winning year of 2024.

Clare were the only Munster county to reduce their spend in 2025 compared to two in Leinster – Kilkenny and Offaly – cut their totals. Kilkenny’s saving was €135,086 and Offaly’s €16,468.

Although Connacht’s five counties’s combined expenditure fell by €375,338 to €6.863m, the total team expenditure for the 32 counties is expected to run close to the €46m mark for the first time having exceeded €44m last year.

In general, the rise in team expenditure appears to be slowing down – in 2023, counties’s total spending figure was just above €40m having been €32.771m in ’22.

The biggest saving made by any county was Armagh who spent over €500k less on their 2025 campaigns than when they won the Sam Maguire Cup in ’24, a drop which represented 25.7%.

Their successors Kerry showed the largest team preparation increasing with €488,986, although Monaghan’s €300,573 rise to €1.151m was proportionally higher, 35.3% to Kerry’s 29.9%.

After Monaghan and Cavan passed the €1m mark, only five of the 32 counties – Carlow, Sligo, Longford, Leitrim and Fermanagh – are expected to have finalised team expenditure totals for the 2025 accounting period less than seven figures. In 2023, 14 counties’s team outlays amounted to less than €1m and in ’24 there were eight.

Six counties surpassed the €2m mark in 2025 – Tipperary, Galway, Cork, Limerick, Kerry and Donegal. Across the 32 counties, the average spend per county last year could settle around €1.43m having been €1.223m two years ago.

Next month, Congress will debate the amateur status review committee’s proposal to introduce a licensing agreement aimed at curbing team costs. Speaking last month, GAA president Jarlath Burns said: “At Congress we have a new proposal that will redefine what it means to be an amateur athlete at elite level. It is also going to obligate counties to apply for a high-performance licence to run their county teams.

“Under that, it will be populated with lots of things. There will be a greater framework around the close season, around the amount of money being spent, particularly given with the interest the Revenue have shown in matters around the payment of people who are around county teams. We hope by that evolutionary process that we start to get costs down."