Allianz League: Will Division 1 retain its lustre?

The last decade has marked the glory days of the Allianz Football League.

An antiquated and unsatisfying championship structure left people yearning for more competitive games between teams of equivalent standard, which the once unfashionable league provided week on week.

This went hand in hand with an elite breakaway in the sport, where the gap between All-Ireland contenders and even those in the middle tier became a chasm.

In the first year of Jack O'Connor's first term as Kerry manager in 2004, his team won a league and championship double but needed a replay to get past Limerick in the Munster final.

Last year, in the midst of achieving another double, they again faced Limerick, just promoted from Division 3, in the provincial decider. The gap this time was 23 points.

Ironically, the post-2008 league format may have played a large part in engendering this elite breakaway in the 2010s. After years/decades of tricking about with various convoluted Division 1A and Division 1B arrangements, pushing the reset button on the structure every couple of years, the GAA switched to the more intuitively conventional 'four-divisions-of-eight-based-on-performance' format in the late noughties.

As Kieran Shannon noted in the RTÉ GAA podcast last year, by hot-housing the best teams in an eight-team top tier, the "mid-cut talent" in the inter-county scene were cut adrift. Soon, the like of Wexford's run to the semi-final in 2008 would become a fantasy.

The corollary of this was that the league increased in gravitas. This year, however, we have a new championship programme, bulging at the seams with games.

The hurling league has been reduced to a series of rinky dink challenge matches, of minimal relevance to what transpires later in the year.