Games Intelligence Unit's 2026 Season Analysis gives hurling a baseline 

By John Harrington

The Games Intelligence Unit’s 2026 Hurling Season Analysis, which you can download in full at the bottom of this article, provides a revealing snapshot of how the game is now played at the highest level.

It’s the product of a huge amount of work that primarily saw the GIU analyse 92 games across six competitions – Divisions 1A and Divisions 1B of the National League, the Liam MacCarthy Cup, the Leinster SHC, the Munser SHC, and the Joe McDonagh Cup.

That added up to 360 hours of analysis, 51 days of coding, 28 team meetings, and 1.4M data points.

Dr. Michael McKay heads up the GIU along with SETU Carlow’s Program Director for the MSc in Sports Performance Analysis, Johnny Bradley, and the GAA’s Strategy, Insights, and Innovation Manager, Dr. Peter Horgan.

He believes the report will act as a baseline that can be used as a comparison for further studies to come and help inform any potential rule changes that could enhance the sport.

“Huge credit needs to go to the taggers and coders who really did a lot of the heavy lifting,” McKay told GAA.ie

“Thanks to them it was quite easy for Johnny (Bradley) and I to pull it all together, relatively speaking.

“Those guys could be spending up to four or five hours per game tagging the level of detail that we wanted so they deserve huge credit.

“We're also very thankful to all the counties and their hurling analysts because this was a new thing this year. We couldn't have done this without their generosity and support.

“This report gives us the baseline. Last year the 2025 Gaelic football season report gave football a baseline, and now hurling has a baseline.

“That means that for 2027, we can do comparisons. But, also, this data can be further interrogated to give you more granular information. For example, it could help referees by mapping if there are period of games where there's more aggressive fouling or more technical fouling.

“The next level of analysis of this data will provide much more granular information for coaching and, potentially, for refereeing games as well.

“It's the first GIU hurling report and it's a massive piece of work and there's much, much more to come from it.”

There’s a huge amount of information in the report, but some trends and statistics are especially illuminating, such as the following:

• Only 39.1% of primary-sample games were decided by six points or fewer. The Munster SHC was the most competitive competition (55% close games), followed by Division 1A (50%).

• The Liam MacCarthy knockout series had the largest average winning margin, 12.6 points, though this is based on only five matches.

• Winners averaged 42.1 shots versus 34.0 for losers, scored about two goals per game versus one, and produced 30.1 total points versus 21.3.

• They had more possessions (75.4 vs 69.6), lower turnover rates (49.9% vs 57.5%), and stronger own-puck-out retention (74.5% vs 68.2%).

• Matches averaged 77 shots, with 60.2% converted into scores. Nearly three-quarters of attempts came from open play, but placed balls were much more accurate: 74.6% conversion versus 54.9% from open play.

• The Munster SHC was the highest-scoring competition, averaging 57 total points per game, and had the strongest overall shooting efficiency (64.9%).

• More goals came after half-time (60%), with over one-third of all goals scored, scored in the final quarter.

• Slightly more scores began from turnovers (52.5%) than from puck-out possessions (47.5%)

• Teams retained 70.7% of their own puck outs overall. Long puck outs were the most common option (55.4% of restarts) but were retained only about half the time (50.4%).

• When teams won their own long puck outs, 44% of those possessions ended in a score, compared with 24.2% after retained short puck outs.

• Winning teams were consistently better at retaining long puck outs and winning opposition restarts.

• Immediate returns to the goalkeeper were rare (3.7% of puck-out possessions) and ended in a turnover more than three-quarters of the time.

• Stick-passes remained the dominant distribution method, making up about 63% of passes. Teams averaged 169 stick-passes and 100 hand-passes per game.

• Rucks averaged 12 per game, but fell sharply through the season, from 18.5 in January to 6.3 in July.

• Games averaged 76.2 turnovers, equal to about 52.6% of possessions. Misplaced strike passes and tackle turnovers together accounted for almost half of all possession losses.

• Referees awarded an average of 25.9 frees per game; 87.3% were classified as aggressive fouls.

What trends stood out most for McKay when he pored over the final document?

“One of the big surprises for me was the relative similarity of the stats across Divisions 1A and 1B,” he says. “Intuitively I would have thought 1A will far exceed in terms of performance 1B, but actually when you look at the comparison, they are broadly similar.

“So, it just goes to show, for teams in Division 1B, there doesn't appear to be this massive gulf. There's obviously a gulf in getting to 1A, but in terms of how the game's played and the metrics of the game, they do seem to be broadly similar.

“I suppose then the five finals (MacCarthy, McDonagh, Ring, Rackard, Meagher) do show that across the widest level of inter-county play, there are differences, fundamental differences in the way that the game's played.

“There's much more jeopardy down around the lower levels, and there's much more control at the very highest level.

“When you look at even puck-out strategies teams tend to go longer down the competition levels. I guess that just speaks to ability on the ball, confidence on the ball, working the ball out from defence at the higher levels of the game.

“So again, it's back to this point of people don't see the Lory Meagher ,people don't see the Nickey Rackard, they see the Liam MacCarthy, and I think they form a lot of their judgements based on that.

“I think the report does shine a bit of a light on hurling down at those other levels.

“Maybe one other thing that stood out was that the Liam McCarthy series was relatively non-competitive.

“When you get to those quarter-finals, semi-finals, final, those games are being won by big margins, and apart from Clare and Limerick this year, the other four games were won by really big margins, and maybe there's just something to be looked at there. It's a small sample size, but it's something worth watching over a period of time to see if that trend continues.”

McKay also found it very interesting that some of what are perceived to be major ills of the modern game aren’t statistically all that significant when you crunch the numbers.

“One of the big moments, I think, for me, was this thing about the back pass to the goalkeeper from a puck out,” he says.

“When we went after that information we discovered that it's a relatively infrequent thing and that it kind of clusters around a number of counties.

“You hear a lot in the popular media that we need to ban the back pass to the goalie because it's killing the game and it's a blight on the game, but it actually really isn't.

“The ruck gets a lot of conversation. But the graph on the ruck shows that the ruck really is a winter/ spring phenomenon. Just even to have that evidence, I think, is massive.

“I think that's really the beauty of doing this type of work is that sometimes we see things with our eyes blinkered but when you actually interrogate what the reality is you see that it's quite different.”