Outside coaches have changed the odds at club level in the GAA

There’s a crew on the GAA’s southern circuit who offer an all-in-one package that might be described as a spice bag. Their service includes managing, coaching, filming both training sessions and matches and then extracting the relevant data. The service offered by these three siblings is so comprehensive and self-sufficient that local selectors are optional but not required. All you need is a napkin to wipe away the curry sauce.

It is no longer the norm for an outside coach at club level to arrive as a one-man band, but if they do the host club would be expected to fill in the gaps: strength and conditioning coach, video analyst and goalkeeping coach as standard; if you want a walnut effect dashboard and heated leather seats you can add a nutritionist and a sports psychologist. Nobody would think it was ostentatious.

One of the most powerful trends in the GAA over the last 20 years has been trickledown imitation. Every elite club, and many others with notions about themselves have become infatuated with the practices of intercounty teams and copycat set-ups. Mostly to scale, but not always.

In his report published last week, Tom Ryan, the director general of the GAA, calculated that a staggering €44m was being spent in the preparation of intercounty teams. This is a jump of €4 million on 12 months ago when Ryan, and others warned that this level of spending was destructive and unsustainable. Nobody flinched or repented. In the club scene the same forces are at play.

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In all of this there is an element of peer pressure. Though it is an amateur organisation, players have no truck with amateur set-ups. Much of the expense comes from the ancillary services provided by professionals in those fields. This is what players want: transparent expertise.

What other successful clubs are doing is never a secret either. Word circulates like pollen. Players are not wired to fret over what it might cost or where the money will be found. They regress to the state of mind that once upon a time convinced them about Santa.

In his report last week Tom Ryan made a list of “idle musings”, which included a GAA world in which no club had an outside manager. Elsewhere in his report he wrote about an organisation whose “ambitions are lofty but whose resources are finite”.

In the funding of management teams at intercounty and club level the GAA is unquestionably living beyond its means and is heading for a hard reckoning.

But the GAA has considered banning “outside” managers or coaches in the past and has always balked at imposing such an injunction. At club level, especially, it is a multilayered issue. On balance outside managers are a force for good; in some cases an overwhelming force for good.

The reputational issue is generated by the minority of coaches who are motivated by greed. There are some whose record of delivering outcomes makes them attractive and whose reputation makes them expensive. The outlay associated with them has escalated beyond reason, even in the last five years.

The problem is that there is generally someone who will meet their price. Some clubs simply have the resources to meet the value they put on winning. Those clubs have queered the pitch for everyone.

The practice has been tainted by the greed of a tiny minority of people; but the practice itself has transformed the prospects of hundreds of clubs who didn’t have the human resources in-house to make the next leap in their development.

In the vast majority of cases outside coaches are honourable and enthusiastic people who take a modest few bob that wouldn’t come close to covering the time they give to the job or the intrusion on their lives. If you didn’t have a passion for working with players, you wouldn’t do it for any money.

All over the country people like this have added value to clubs that needed to be saved from themselves or needed an injection of something: expertise, experience, authority, ambition, hope, a break from internal politics; freshness.

With an outside coach it is easy to get it wrong; but when a club gets it right whole new horizons appear. The energy from that feeling electrifies a dressingroom.

At intercounty level, it is often a lazy solution, and it rarely works as well as people expect. Offaly have been the conspicuous outliers:

Fr Tom Gillooly from Westmeath managed their footballers to All-Irelands in 1971 and 72 − although he had been a priest in the county since the late 1950s − and Eugene McGee from Longford was their manager in 1982. Dermot Healy from Kilkenny, Eamon Cregan from Limerick and Michael Bond from Galway led them to the only four hurling All-Irelands they have won.

In his report published last week, Tom Ryan, the director general of the GAA, calculated that a staggering €44m was being spent in the preparation of intercounty teams. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho

Beyond that the only other outside coach to deliver an All-Ireland is John O’Mahony with the Galway footballers in 1998. Think for a second of all the outside managers that have been appointed over the last 50 years.

Breakthrough All-Irelands in the modern era have consistently been delivered by home-grown managers. Donegal, Tyrone and Armagh in football and Clare in hurling are interesting examples.

The next time those counties won an All-Ireland they were managed, or co-managed, by a player from the breakthrough squad. In Clare’s case that has been true for their next two All-Irelands. They haven’t had an outside manager in more than 30 years and wouldn’t dream of it now.

But with clubs who need an outside manager to make a breakthrough the same potential is being seeded. The overwhelming likelihood is that somebody from that team will have the confidence to manage the next generation.

The impact of outside coaches on the club scene is exponentially greater than at intercounty level because in every grade of club activity around the country there are more teams with a realistic chance of winning a county title. They might just be looking for an indefinable something that they can’t source within.

There are many sincere people who can make that difference. Reducing the cost of training teams is a massive issue for the GAA – but that is true whether the coach is from outside or from within. At club level, outside coaches have changed the odds. That should be remembered.