John Prenty: Extending inter-county season would tell club players 'we don’t care about you'

Connacht GAA CEO John Prenty. Pic: James Crombie/Inpho

Extending the inter-county season by two weeks would amount to telling club players that “we don’t care about you”.

That is the view of Connacht GAA CEO John Prenty, who is firmly opposed to the calendar motion going before Congress this weekend.

The proposal of the Croke Park sub-committee is to push the All-Ireland football final out by two weeks and the All-Ireland hurling final out a week from their current dates so as to deliver two weeks of separation between the blue riband events.

Extension at one end of the inter-county calendar would be compensated for by disbanding the pre-season competitions and writing into rule that no inter-county competition can throw-in before the fourth weekend of January.

The motion requires 60% approval, with a growing expectation that all five counties in Connacht and potentially all six in Munster will vote against the proposed two-week extension.

Connacht chief Prenty has said the proposal is disrespectful towards club players, while also rubbishing the argument that the GAA is losing out from a promotional perspective by continuing with July All-Ireland finals and not having the inter-county product on display in August.

“Do we not care about club players at all? Are we only about inter-county? Because that’s what we’d be saying by changing the calendar,” Prenty began.

“If we pass this motion, the disruption it is going to cause to club players and the certainty it will remove. The certainty club players have had for the past few years, why are we looking to take that from them? Why shouldn’t club players have the same certainty as inter-county players do with regard to their fixture schedules?

“Also, there are club dual players in every county. Are we going to give them no break, just set them off in the middle of August and let them keep going until they die with their boots on? The break weekends that many counties have factored into their club calendars to give these dual players a week off will not be possible under the extension being proposed.

“On the promotional side of it, you come down to Connacht and take a look at all the local newspapers during the club championship, there could be 45 pages of reports on the club championship. It’s not that we are not promoting GAA, we’re promoting it probably bigger than the county stuff.

“How is the GAA suffering by not having inter-county in August? In what way are we suffering? Like, we have every single parish in the country involved in August now that we never had in the past. You look at the gate receipts from the club championship in August - huge. Bigger than ever before (overall club gate receipts improved to €19m in 2025).” 

With 2026 the first year of the new Sam Maguire format, and the space this has created in the middle of the inter-county championship calendar whereby counties can reach the last eight after just two All-Ireland series games, Prenty cannot understand why Croke Park are looking to extend the end of the season before assessing how the new format works.

Unlike the group format that was in place for the past three years, the minimum number of All-Ireland series games required to advance to the quarter-finals has reduced from four to three.

“We've made a tweak for this year with the new format. So, before we even know what the tweak is like and how it plays out, we want to make another tweak,” Prenty continued.

“The new football format is a good tweak, and I'd like to see how it pans out. One thing it puts into the championship that we didn't have the last couple of years is jeopardy, and that’s what people like.” 

The Connacht CEO knows how his opposition to the calendar proposal will be perceived in certain quarters, that he is minding his own patch in not wanting any curtain to fall on the pre-season competitions and the money they pour into provincial coffers.

Prenty’s response is that his loyalty is to club first.

“While I am the provincial CEO and have a vested interest, I have a huge vested interest in my club, and I've been a selector of my club for as long as I can remember.

“The players we have out there are the real GAA people in this country. Every county player we have it's a great honour, but it's a bigger honour to get them back and play for our club. So that's where my vested interest is, it is in the club.

“If you look at the tweak we made to the pre-season competitions this year and protecting players who were involved in third-level competitions, the talk from all managers was how beneficial the FBD League was and how more young fellas got a chance to wear a county jersey than ever before.

“You play a challenge match between Galway and Mayo in Letterfrack on a Tuesday night, you don't know how a young player will react when there's people roaring and shouting and supporting him. These competitions give the county management an opportunity to vet those fellas properly.”