Football championship set to break GAA financial records again

The All-Ireland SFC quarter-final double-header featuring Louth v Monaghan and Dublin v Galway was one of the sell-out days at Croke Park. Pic: Seb Daly/Sportsfile

Widely considered as the best for entertainment and quality, the All-Ireland senior football championship is also expected to be most lucrative for the GAA.

Croke Park’s concerns that the change to the competition’s framework would cost them €1 million will be allayed by the success of this year’s renewal.

In early June, GAA president Jarlath Burns said the association was budgeting for gate receipts to be down because of the disbandment of the group stages for an enhanced qualifier system.

“We might come to the end of this year and see that it has balanced itself out but we're budgeting on our assumptions that we'll have €1m less because there are 16 fewer games (eight in the Sam Maguire Cup, eight in the Tailteann Cup),” he said.

Gate receipts for last year’s 35-game Sam Maguire Cup (non-provincial) were a considerable €21.8 million with total attendances of 641,429. Those figures show a new rules bump from 2024 when the corresponding figures were €17.9m and 512,001.

Despite eight fewer matches, this year’s crowds for the slimmed down Sam Maguire Cup will exceed those of 2025 with the final total going close to the 700,000 mark.

Over 470,000 attended the last nine matchdays of the football championship, two of which were the All-Ireland quarter-final double-headers. For the first time, both semi-finals were sell-out affairs as was the Sunday quarter-final day involving Louth v Monaghan and Dublin v Galway.

Kerry’s attractive clashes against Donegal and Armagh in Rounds 1 and 3 attracted a combined number of 46,386. The Dublin-Donegal Round 3 clash in Croke Park was watched by 32,220, while 25,400 witnessed the Galway-Westmeath Round 2A meeting in Pearse Stadium and 16,181 were at the Roscommon-Tyrone Round 1 match.

Meanwhile, the figures for the All-Ireland senior hurling championship are also set to show an increase from 2025 despite losing the All-Ireland preliminary quarter-finals.

Last year’s total attendance and gate receipts for the All-Ireland SHC series came to 266,170 and €13.3m. This year’s five championship games attracted 274,355 to the five games.

The Munster Council are expected to announce their greatest gate receipts total early next year when the first Kerry-Cork Munster final in a normal year since 2017 is combined with the monies amassed from the province’s round-robin hurling championship.

A crowd of 32,691 watched the football decider in Fitzgerald Stadium in May, while the total for the hurling competition will be approximately 319,646, slightly down on last year’s figure of 320,299 when the competition reaped €8.381m in gate receipts.