Munster football seedings will push provincial championship closer to obsolescence

It will be interesting to see if there will be any player revolt in Munster's off-Broadway football panels this autumn.

Last Thursday, the Munster Council voted to seed Kerry and Cork on opposite sides of the 2026 provincial championship draw. 

That’s not the wording of the change, but that is the intent.

The fig-leaf phrasing gifts seeding to the highest-ranked counties based on the previous year’s Football League.

Notably, there was no push for such a change when Clare finished ahead of Cork for five consecutive years between the 2018 and 2022 Leagues.

This is the third time that Munster GAA top brass have decided to reintroduce seeding two teams on opposite sides of the draw since the practice was abolished in 1990. 

On both previous occasions, for the 2008 and 2014 championships, it lasted one year before being scrapped again.

On the last occasion, Clare, Limerick, Tipperary, and Waterford withdrew from the McGrath and Railway Cups in protest. Other players were reported to be considering their inter-county futures. 

The four squads threatened to boycott the subsequent year’s championship unless the decision was reversed.

Eventually, the Munster Council relented. It ended with all six counties voting unanimously to reject the structure.

At the time, Limerick footballer Pa Ranahan summed up the mutinous mood when tweeting: “Has it ever happened that a provincial championship only had 1 actual match? 2014 could be a first. #Nuclear.” 

Fast forward to 2025, and it appears the Treaty’s representatives swayed the vote against the wishes of their Tailteann Cup finalists.

“The Limerick players were adamant that they didn't want this,” manager Jimmy Lee told the Irish Examiner. 

“They made their views known in writing. And now the county board, in their wisdom, have knifed them in the back. That is what it feels like.

It's a vote of no confidence in us.” 

Prior to the removal of seeding, there was an uninterrupted quarter-century of Cork and Kerry Munster finals between 1966 and 1991.

ROUTE TO GLORY

It’s no coincidence that the famous ‘there won’t be a cow milked in Clare’ final came just a year later in 1992. Nor that Tipperary found a route to glory on the 100th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday massacre in 2020. 

Are there two better stories in the history of the Munster Championship?

Should the province not exist to raise the prospects of these counties, rather than to put them back in their place?

For many, the provincial championships are living on borrowed time. I have always been in favour of retaining them in some form because of the potential for fairytale stories to emerge, like Leitrim in 1994 or Louth this summer. This decision moves the Munster Championship a step closer to obsolescence.

Bear in mind, Clare won their right to be seeded for the 2026 championship on the field of play. 

They beat every other county in Munster apart from Kerry across the past three seasons to do so. It should be taken from them in the honourable way, on the field of play, rather than in the boardroom.

It can’t be argued that this is all about having competitive Munster finals. Clare lost their three deciders against Kerry by an average of just under 11 points per game. Cork have lost their three most recent finals against the Kingdom by an average of 14 points per game.

If competitions are to be manipulated to maximise financial gain, maybe we should seed Dublin straight into the All-Ireland semi-finals in perpetuity.

But it’s not like we’re going to be talking about sold-out stadiums here. There were 5,084 extra fans at the last Kerry-Cork final compared to this year’s Kerry-Clare renewal.

It’s not like no one turns out when the Old Firm meet in a semi-final. The 2024 last-four crowd was just 697 fewer than their most recent final meeting.

This motion was ushered through by exploiting an apathy towards football, which will ultimately weaken the province and those counties most in need of support.

Dressing it up as a three-year trial seems a way to handcuff players to this new system and avoid the one-season abolitions of 2008 and 2014.

What if the current squads were to repeat the activism of their predecessors a decade ago? Back then, the McGrath and Railway Cups were the disposable elements which could be boycotted to prove a grander point. The provincial championships were still integral to teams’ summer ambitions.

TARGET

That is no longer the case. The Tailteann Cup has become a greater target for many counties. And with the McGrath and Railway Cups terminated, who’s to say the provincial championship couldn’t be targeted for a strike action if those counties were to embrace a rebellious streak?