Maher was playing for much more than a club

Irish sport is usually dominated by the big three — the GAA, IRFU, and FAI. Being an Olympic year, however, 2020 gives other sports a chance to shine: Rhys McClenaghan in gymnastics, the women’s hockey team, our athletes, boxers, canoeists, rowers; even dressage, and, of course, Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry in golf.

The big question at the moment is whether the Russians will be present at the Tokyo Games, having been banned for four years by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

We’ve been here before. Prior to the 2018 Winter Olympics, Russia was in similar trouble and yet 169 Russians took part as neutrals in what was the third biggest ‘team’ at those Games.

Expect a similar approach to be taken for Tokyo 2020.

Closer to home, Tokyo 2020 will be the first test of the newly constituted Olympic Federation of Ireland. OFI has undergone impressive governance reforms and even more impressively has attracted a suite of top-class sports administrators — Sarah Keane, Peter Sherrard, and Sarah O’Shea; but an Olympics year is an unpredictable year.

In the UK, there is already a bitter legal battle involving leading athletes such as Katarina Johnson-Thompson, Mo Farah, and Laura Muir.

Under Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter, the right of athletes to promote their personal sponsors — the ones who likely have supported them from the start — is strictly regulated for the duration of the Olympics.

A total of 20% of the IOC’s revenue, which it passes on to national Olympic committees, comes from official sponsorships and the IOC strictly guards these sponsorships and does not like athletes of any country promoting rival sponsorship deals during an Olympics.

Based on a recent court case in Germany, the IOC has had to relax this rule and a group of 20 leading British athletes have instigated legal action because they feel that the British Olympic Committee have has not yet fully passed on the benefit to them.

Whatever the challenges faced by the OFI in the lead up to Tokyo 2020, its structures and personnel appear robust enough to deal with them.

This is in stark contrast to the farrago that is the FAI.

Although governance reforms have begun, reports into the recent, murky financial history of the FAI appear never ending.

What seems to be emerging is a three-way split in the functions of the FAI and possibly even its relaunch as an umbrella body known as Football Ireland with separate units governing grassroots and schools’ football; an entity to run the League of Ireland; and a unit that deals with international football from senior to underage level.While a lot of focus is on the relationship between the Government and the FAI, it seems as if football in Ireland has largely been abandoned by Fifa.

Normally, when a government seeks to involve itself in the running of a football association, Fifa aggressively tells them to butt out, invoking Fifa statutes (Articles 14 and 19) which oblige national FAs “to manage their affairs independently and ensure that their own affairs are not influenced by any third parties”.

Moreover, if a national FA is unable to run itself, Fifa usually appoints what it calls a “normalisation” committee to run that FA. In 2019, Fifaappointed normalisationcommittees to run football in Namibia, Pakistan, and Egypt.

Thus far in Ireland, Fifa seem content to let Uefa and the Government sort out the FAI mess or, more precisely, financially underwrite its recovery.

Being successful internationally will be critical to the FAI’s financial future. The FAI’s situation is often contrasted with the financial soundness of the IRFU. In July, the IRFU announced its best-ever financial year with revenues of €87.5 million for the 2018/19 season.

Nevertheless, the IRFU was careful to point out that the men’s international game accounted for 81% of its revenues.

Taking into account PRO14 and European club revenue, the IRFU highlighted that 96% of its revenues are “attributable to the men’s professional game”.

A number of reformers in the FAI have spoken about the government subsidising football to the same extent as the greyhound or horse racing industries.

An interesting point here is that in 2020, Irish gambling law will undergo significant reform. In many countries, sports bodies such as the FAI are given the right to profit from all wagering on their sport and a similar gambling levy could be applied by the Government to underwrite the FAI.

In an overall sense, the link between gambling and sport deepened in 2019. I support Watford — no sniggering — and as with half the teams in the Premier League, their shirt is sponsored by a gambling company.

What is of interest, however, is that some of the gambling companies, while sponsoring English teams, cannot offer bets to English punters but only to gamblers in the largely unregulated Asian betting markets.

Wayne Rooney, now at Derby in the Championship, recently spoke out about his personal problems with gambling.

Both his club and the league it plays in are sponsored by gambling companies.

Rob Howley, the former Wales rugby coach, was recently given a ban of 18 months for betting on rugby.

To those unfamiliar with gambling, it seems strange that someone of Howley’s experience would risk his career and in such a naïve way — it seems he used his work phone and email to place bets.

But the allure of gambling — mixed with both insider knowledge of a sport and personal pressures — can make people act in strange, sometimes self-destructive, ways.

The GAA eschews all gambling sponsorship and has never really got the credit for doing so.

The GAA itself has had a largely directionless year — the AFL is, unhindered, scouting the country for talent, male and female; financial issues at various country boards have been allowed fester; the GAA still seems to be coming to terms with the fact that the players’ association (the GPA) wants what every other player association worldwide wants; and the fixtures issue rumbles on.

This slightly cynical air to the GAA could be found in one of the most dispiriting pieces I read in 2019 from a well-known GAA journalist who could not hide his boredom at being sent to Thurles on a dull November day to cover a club championship match.

The thrust of the piece was that the GAA, as a commercial and marketing exercise, is all about the inter-county scene — a scene which a recent ESRI report indicates is both sham-amateurism and close to unsustainable in nature.

And yet on a dull November day, Tipperary’s Brendan Maher gave one of the greatest club displays ever as Borrisoleigh defeated Ballygunner to win the Munster senior hurling club title. He matched that performance at the weekend in the semi-final even with half a hurley.

Watching Maher you knew, given the year his community had off the field in 2019, that on the field in 2020 he was playing for much more than a club.

Jack Anderson is Professor of Law at University of Melbourne.