Former Waterford hurler John Mullane has called on the GAA’s most senior officials to overhaul the All-Ireland senior hurling championship format, arguing in blunt terms that Gaelic football has overtaken hurling as the more compelling product. Speaking on RTÉ Radio One’s Saturday Sport, as reported by RTE.ie, Mullane framed the situation as a slow-moving crisis that those running the association can no longer afford to defer.
“Yeah, it’s worrying for hurling,” he said, before laying out a series of structural grievances that he believes are quietly eroding the game’s standing.
Format-Driven Jeopardy and How Championship Markets Price It
Karla Ruiz, a sports-content specialist at Apuestas.guru who covers international competition formats for Spanish-language audiences, sees in Mullane’s critique a dynamic familiar across several major sports markets. The core issue, in her reading, is structural. A championship that bunches its most decisive games into a narrow window reduces the season’s cumulative jeopardy, and less sustained jeopardy means less week-to-week engagement from supporters tracking outcomes across months rather than weeks.
Ruiz notes that the number of live fixtures a format allows, and the spread of genuine upset potential across the calendar, is the precise mechanism that determines how much tension a season actually carries. Outright championship odds, she observes, are one measurable expression of that tension, repriced each week as results accumulate and contenders emerge or collapse. In that context, she points to how apuestas.guru builds its championship coverage around exactly that kind of format-driven uncertainty, treating the competition structure itself as the engine of odds movement rather than any single result.
Mullane’s own language aligns with that analysis. Football, he said, is “the only show in town now” and its structure is “top class.” The implicit comparison with hurling is unflattering.
“I’ll be straight up with you, I think something has to give (and) I think something has to change.”
Munster’s Dominance and Leinster’s Decade of Exclusion
When Mullane turns to the specific mechanics of the problem, he focuses first on provincial competition. The Munster Championship, he argues, is “the elephant in the room” — a phrase he deploys without qualification.
“The elephant in the room is the Munster Championship,” he said, acknowledging that the provincial series still generates significant revenue and commands prestige, while warning it is heading “a long way to going the other way where it’s not in a healthy stage.”
The Leinster imbalance gives that warning statistical weight. No Leinster team has won the All-Ireland senior hurling championship since 2015, a run of 11 years. Mullane finds that statistic difficult to justify.
“When you flip that over to the Leinster Championship, there hasn’t been a Leinster winner of the All-Ireland since 2015. That’s 11 years now.”
The case of Kilkenny sharpens the point further. That county has gone 11 years without lifting the Liam MacCarthy Cup — “unheard of,” in Mullane’s word. He said he would welcome the sight of Wexford bringing 60,000 or 70,000 supporters to Croke Park for a semi-final. The football code, meanwhile, has seen Louth reach an All-Ireland semi-final and Westmeath claim a Leinster title, suggesting the football model is generating more distributed success across counties. Mullane is careful to note he does not believe hurling must mirror the football championship structure exactly, but insists the GAA must “take the learnings from what football are doing.”
A Fixture Drought Through Summer’s Peak Months
The calendar argument sits alongside the structural one. Mullane’s complaint is not simply about which teams are winning, but about when games are being played, and crucially, when they are not.
“What an awful lot of the hurling fraternity will say is that, all the games are being rushed off in April and May and come June, July, then we’re just left with a sprinkle of games.”
Football, by contrast, is “exploding” through that same June and July window with a heavy schedule of fixtures demanding attention. The comparison becomes stark at the margins of the summer. Mullane pointed specifically to an August bank holiday weekend on which no inter-county hurling game was available on television. A proposal to extend the championship by two weeks, which might have addressed some of that vacancy, was never put to a congress vote — a decision he criticised directly. The absence of games on a national holiday weekend, when audiences are at leisure and football is active, captures the competitive disadvantage in a single image.
Molumphy Ratified as Waterford Manager
Away from the structural debate, Mullane also addressed a more immediate piece of news for Waterford supporters. His former teammate Stephen Molumphy was ratified as Waterford’s new senior hurling manager during the same week, and Mullane was forthright in his support.
“I think he will gain huge respect straight away within the Waterford dressing room off the back of his playing career. But for me, I think Stephen Molumphy will be great.”
Mullane’s enthusiasm was accompanied by a wider point about how modern GAA management operates. The head coach role, he argued, has grown in significance to the point where it can shape a county’s fortunes as decisively as any other appointment. He cited Paul Kinnerk’s contribution to Limerick and Mikey Bevans’ work with Tipperary as evidence of how the right coaching personnel can alter a county’s trajectory.
For Molumphy, that means the quality of the people he recruits around him will matter as much as anything he brings personally. Mullane’s closing thought on the appointment was practical rather than celebratory — that surrounding himself with strong backroom staff will be among the new manager’s most consequential early decisions, whether or not the championship structure he inherits is ever reformed.
