The careful consideration that goes into GAA Master Fixtures
A sign at the top of Jones' Road ahead of the GAA Hurling All-Ireland Senior Championship final match between Cork and Tipperary at Croke Park in Dublin. Photo by Daire Brennan/Sportsfile.
By John Harrington
When the GAA Master Fixtures for 2026 dropped earlier today, chances are you immediately zoned in on your own county’s New Year schedule.
Whether you were pleased, displeased, or somewhere in between about the path they’ll plot in the Allianz Leagues, your focus was probably a narrow one which is fair enough because you only support one county.
Spare a thought though for the good people of the GAA’s Central Competitions Control Committee (CCCC) who have to factor in a myriad of considerations before fitting every piece of the fixtures jigsaw painstakingly into place, all the time knowing you’ll never please all the people all of the time.
In the Allianz Leagues alone you’re talking about 67 teams in two codes across nine divisions playing 226 fixtures over 11 weekends. That’s the sports fixture planning equivalent of top-speed Tetris.
“It’s a massive amount of work,” agrees CCCC Chairperson, Brian Carroll.
“There are so many different pieces of the jigsaw that has to be put together to get to the final fixtures plan. In the league particularly, there's just a massive amount of work involved in it because there's so many pieces that have to fit together between the two codes.
“When you're putting together 226 fixtures in football and hurling, it's always going to be a huge challenge because there's only so many dates there.
“A lot of work goes into it with all the counties and they would acknowledge that. You can't keep everybody happy, unfortunately, because there's so many different angles we have to take.”
Competition integrity is a foremost consideration. The football and hurling leagues run on two-year cycles with Year 2 fixtures reversed from Year 1 fixtures so there’s a fair distribution of home and away games.
Chairperson of the GAA's Central Competitions Control Committee, Brian Carroll.
Other considerations include code clashes (not always avoidable as there are five double weekends in the League), suitability of venues for evening games, TV requirements, and competition promotion.
“We always try and make sure that in the first two rounds a team will always have a home and away game to keep it fair that way,” says Carroll.
“We aim that no team will have more than two home or away games in a row as well.
“And then for the cycle change some counties think that they'll automatically have the opposite of what they had the previous year, and for the ones at the end of the cycle that doesn't always work out because we start a new cycle every two years.
“Venues are a huge thing because when you're playing these games in late January and February and March, weather is obviously going to be an issue and there's not too many venues at that time of the year that can take double-headers.
“Croke Park and Páirc Uí Chaoimh are nearly the only two that can take them at that time of the year.
“Then you'll have issues with floodlights. There are some Division 1 teams in both hurling and football that don't have lights. So that straightaway has an impact on what games you can put on a Saturday evening.
“Then there are some counties that don't want a direct clash between the football and hurling.
“We also send teams to London and London can only host one game per weekend. That has to be done that way to provide flexibility for the travelling counties for the cost of flights.
“When it comes to promoting the game, you want to try to start and end the League with big games and tie all that in together to our work with the TV companies and our contract obligations with them.
“Our aim is to have six games for TV each weekend and that's not easy because the broadcasters want high profile games and you need venues of light to be able to do the games on Saturdays. So that's a challenge as well."
Bad weather is an ever-present danger to a carefully constructued fixture schedule.
The old proverb , ‘Man plans and God laughs’, seems applicable to the Allianz League fixture programme because inclement weather always has the potential to play havoc with it.
Organising venue changes and shoe-horning postponed matches into an already crowded playing calendar is an all-too-common headache that the GAA’s games administrators are faced with.
“It's a huge challenge,” says Carroll. “In fairness to Bernard Smith (GAA Games Administration Manager) and Feargal McGill (GAA Director of Player, Club, and Games Administration) in Croke Park I'd say they'd be pulling their hair out when they see bad weather coming at the weekend.
“They're on the phones through Friday and Saturday checking venues and making sure that they’re playable.
“Because at the end of the day you want to make sure that supporters and teams know fairly well in advance and that it's not left to the last minute to make a call like that.
“I suppose it's the one thing that's really out of your control and it’s a unique situation because it's not just the same across the board. The weather could be perfect in the west of the country and you could be in trouble down south or vice versa.
“Some venues can take games and others can't. Storms can cause power outages in certain parts of the country and that can cause big problems.
“If you're outside looking in you wouldn't think of all the small things that have to be kept in mind but the weather is a huge challenge. Hopefully in 2026 we'll get a run of luck with it.”
One notable aspect of the 2026 GAA Master Fixtures is the new format for the All-Ireland SFC and Tailteann Cup which has given room in the diary for a buffer between the Allianz Football League and provincial football championships.
“It has created a free weekend after the League Finals and that hopefully will give counties that bit of incentive to go harder for a League Final because it was causing trouble in counties who were out in the championship six or seven days after the League Final," says Carroll.
“In my own county Roscommon last year we were in a League Final on the Saturday and had to fly to London six days later to play in the championship and that's not ideal for counties.
“The free weekend will be a good help there. It guarantees that gap between the league final and first round of the championship. That should be a good help to us.”
When it comes to the considerable challenge of putting together the GAA Master Fixtures on an annual basis, every little helps.