Squeezed middle in football sprinting to stand still as league gets underway

The 2024 Allianz Football League is upon us. The competition widely accepted as the sport's best structured and hardest to call, which some of its leading lights may not actually be interested in winning.

Mayo won it last year and a fat lot of good it did them when they were out in the Connacht SFC a week later and beaten by Roscommon. Looking at the April schedules of the All-Ireland contenders, it would be no surprise to see Kerry and Dublin - not exactly put to the pin of their collar in their provincial championships - reach the league decider.

It would be great to see those plucky underdogs get their time in the sun.

Gaelic football has a lot of detractors, which goes with being one of the top spectator and participatory sports in the country, but the fare on the pitch is rarely as bad as it's made out.

Novel use of goalkeepers, rampaging defenders, a new wave of generational midfielders and mesmeric forwards of the Clifford/Walsh/O'Callaghan variety mean that a good game of football can still be very, very good.

Unfortunately, regardless of the quality of the games that populate the season, the outcomes tend to be very similar.

The league has been won by eight different counties this century, but since the strictly tiered four divisions were introduced in 2008, only Derry and Cork have broken up the Dublin, Kerry, Mayo hegemony. And the gap between the elites and the rest has grown wider and wider.

My colleague Niall McCoy outlined here late last year how we are now into our 21st year waiting for a first-time winner of Sam Maguire.

Nineteen teams have won an All-Ireland, but, as Niall spells out: "Of the 14 teams that entered last year's championship season without an All-Ireland title to their name, 10 played in the