Games Intelligence Unit's 2026 Gaelic football Season Analysis report paints a revealing picture
Johnny Bradley of the GAA's Games Intelligence Unit (GIU) speaking during a GAA Gaelic Football Expert Advisory Group (EAG) media briefing at Croke Park in Dublin. Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile
By John Harrington
The GAA Games Intelligence Unit’s 2026 Gaelic Football Season Analysis report has landed, and it’s a serious body of work.
You can view and download the report in full at the bottom of this article, but the general picture is that the objective numbers corroborate the widespread subjective view that a greater premium was placed on attacking football in 2026.
There were more goals, more goal attempts, more two-point attempts, and more hand-passes and foot-passes.
Teams are clearly getting to better grips with the post-FRC game because more kick-outs were retained, there was a higher shot efficiency, and fewer fouls and turnovers.
Over 800 hours of analysis and 100 working days of coding covering 200 intercounty matches across all four National League divisions, provincial championships, the Sam Maguire Cup, and the Tailteann Cup have resulted in a fascinating snapshot of what Gaelic football now looks like at the highest level.
The scale of the work that went into producing the report is staggering.
SETU Carlow’s Program Director for the MSc in Sports Performance Analysis, Johnny Bradley, head ups the Games Intelligence Unit along with Ulster University’s Dr. Michael McKay, and the GAA’s Strategy, Insights, and Innovation Manager, Dr. Peter Horgan, and is rightly pleased with the fruits of their considerable labour.
“From a personal perspective I'm very proud to be involved in it with the team, with Dr Michael McKay and Dr Peter Horgan, and all of the coders who did such great work,” Bradley told GAA.ie
“When you know the investment that people have put into it in terms of their time and in terms of the effort that goes in and the buy-in from the stakeholders, the inter-county team set-ups, it really is satisfying to have it completed.
“A lot of work has gone into it. For example, in the National League we have 16 games every weekend, so we need to get that footage back from the counties as quickly as possible.
“By Monday morning we have all the footage, and then we ship that out to our coders, and each coder would have an allocated set of games they would analyse.
“It probably takes about three or four hours to analyse a game and then we feed that all back and we data-base that up so then we have that record and can ask questions of it. It's fairly extensive, there's no doubt, and we pride ourselves on being as reliable as possible.
“When the games come back in we go through a reliability process to make sure that things are lining up and adding up.
“We have a really strong relationship with the inter-county analysts, and that's really been built on over the last 10 years with the community of practice in the Performance Analysis community.
“We feed some of that information back to the counties every week as well, so they have access to that, and it makes their job a little bit easier when it comes to analysing their games as well.”
Source of scores by possession origin and competition in the 2026 senior inter-county Gaelic football season.
The GIU’s 2026 season analysis heavily informed the proposals that the Football Expert Advisory Group chaired by Kevin McStay will trial in the upcoming Higher Education Division 1 League and pre-season provincial competitions.
Because the GAA has an objective base-line of what Gaelic football has now looked like for the last two years at the highest level, it will be much easier to track the positive impact or otherwise of any proposal.
“The game is in a really good place and the fact that the GAA have invested collecting this information means we now know what good looks like and because we have that data we’ll be able to see how the rules that will soon be trialled will enhance the game further or not,” says Bradley.
“Because we have this data the GAA is better informed to make the game was good as we would like it to be because we want better football, ultimately.
“We want it to be a spectacle for all stakeholders, players, supporters, everybody. So, the fact that we have this information from last year and the year previous, we can say, look, this has had a positive impact or not, and we can move on from there.”
Shot efficiency by scoring type across the 2026 senior inter-county Gaelic football season.
The Gaelic games Performance Analysis community in Ireland has long been a very friendly and collaborative one where ideas and resources are shared freely.
Long before the GIU came along all senior inter-county football teams have shared their Allianz League video footage that’s captured by the team’s performance analysts.
That resource was a spin-off from the annual community of practice day where accredited performance analysts and anyone with an interest in the sport science come together in IT Carlow to share their ideas.
Kick-out length distribution by competition across the 2026 senior inter-county Gaelic football season.
Without that already long-established community of practice, it’s difficult to imagine that the GIU would have been able to lean so successfully on all the inter-county Performances Analysts to collect the data required to produce this report.
“It would have been impossible,” says Bradley.
“Dr Denise Martin years ago had the foresight to put together an accreditation programme and bring the performance analysis community together.
“A lot of the analysts that are operating at inter-county and club level have all had the opportunity to be accredited.
“We published the Gaelic games Performance Analysis Guide for Good Practice a few years ago and that's been really important.
“I'm programme director for the MSc in Sport performance analysis in SETU Carlow, we've been running that programme for 12 years now, and we've seen a lot of our top inter-county analysts come through that programme.
“With the community we have and the technological advances of the analysts, performance analysis within Gaelic games is on a par now with any sport in the world. Every year there's innovation from these guys and it's incredible the amount of work that they do.
“Performance analysis now is seen as a vital component of how teams prepare and so important for coaching set-ups. Not just at inter-county level but also at club level.
“It helps players and coaches to better understand where the game is, where they can make gains, and how they can improve.
“The beauty of sport is that everybody sees the game a different way, but we're trying to put a wee bit of objectivity on that.”
The GAA’s Games Intelligence Unit’s 2026 Gaelic Football Season Analysis report can be viewed and downloaded below.
