There are no odds available yet for the 2024 All-Ireland intermediate club football title but everybody knows who the standout favourites are.
Barring a major surprise, Austin Stacks will win the intermediate title in Kerry and, at that stage, they’ll have already cleared the highest hurdles en route to the steps of the Hogan Stand.
Indeed, they weren’t too far off landing the biggest prize in club football last season as they won the Kerry senior title and lost the Munster final by just two points to St Finbarr’s, who themselves were only beaten after extra time in the All-Ireland semi-final by eventual champions Kilcoo.
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Stacks are, essentially, a senior team that got into something of a rut last year and, given the unforgiving structures in Kerry, found themselves relegated to intermediate.
With just eight clubs (along with eight divisional teams) in the senior grade in Kerry, nobody is safe.
And the knock-on effect of that is that the odds are stacked in favour of the county’s representative clubs in the lower grades when they go into Munster and beyond.
By winning the intermediate title in 2022, Rathmore were ostensibly the ninth-ranked team in Kerry.
They took their place in the Munster Championship alongside the likes of Na Piarsaigh, the 13th-ranked football team in Limerick whose priority is hurling, and Kanturk, the 25th-ranked football club in Cork as premier intermediate champions (there are two grades above that, premier senior and senior A).
No wonder that Kerry clubs have won 14 out of the 18 Munster intermediate titles and all of them since 2014. No club from Tipperary, Waterford, Limerick or Clare has ever won it.
With 16 intermediate teams in Kerry, it evens out somewhat after that. Fossa, for example, played Castlemahon in the Munster junior semi-final, both clubs ranked 25th in their respective counties, but it’s hardly a meeting of equals either when the third tier winners from the football’s biggest powerhouse are matched with the equivalent from Limerick. Fossa won by 20 points.
At the weekend they became the 11th Kerry winners of the All-Ireland junior title since its inception in 2004, with Rathmore the seventh club from the county to take intermediate honours.
Clearly, the Kerry senior Championship needs to be expanded to allow for more clubs and the drip-down effect that that would bring.
Up to 2016, there were 11 clubs and nine divisional teams in the senior grade but GAA Congress voted two years ago to limit the number of teams in any senior grade to 16. Kerry would be understandably loathe to dismantle their divisional structure, but some creative thinking whereby non-club teams would play-off against each other to earn their spot in the championship proper should be able to circumvent that.
It’s far from just being a Kerry issue either as the threshold for qualification for lower grade provincial competitions is hopelessly lopsided right across the country.
While it’s stacked in Kerry’s favour, the opposite applies to Dublin, for example. In the capital, there are 16 teams in the senior 1 grade and another 16 in senior 2. The intermediate champions, the 33rd ranked club in the county, then enter the Leinster intermediate Championship and the junior champions (the county’s 49th club) play in the provincial junior competition.
Unsurprisingly, Dublin clubs have only won the Leinster intermediate and junior titles once each and neither went on to claim All-Ireland honours.
In 2017, former GAA director general Paraic Duffy highlighted the “wide disparity in the determination of what constitutes an intermediate or junior club” in his annual report, while just last weekend in the Irish Examiner Sean Kelly, GAA president when these competitions were introduced a couple of decades ago, called for a “rebalance”.
The current office holders need to heed Duffy and Kelly’s words.
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