Analysis: The last redesign of Gaelic football's rules certainly worked well, so what are the new proposed modifications about?
By Phil Kearney and Luke Barrett, University of Limerick
Gaelic football's Expert Advisory Group, chaired by Kevin McStay, has announced a new set of modified rules to be trialled in this year's third-level Ryan Cup. Among them are a ban on fisted points, a backcourt rule where a team cannot pass back into their own half of the pitch and a limit of three consecutive handpasses before the ball must be kicked.
Before assessing these rule modifications, it is worth being clear about what this is and isn't. It is a trial. As McStay put it in a recent interview, "whether a rule works or not, I am open to waiting….I would really ask for people to read what is happening with the rules, examine and reflect on them. Until we see them, we won't know. If they don't add value, they won't be added into the rule book."
That instinct – trial, observe, reflect, decide – is exactly right, and it reflects a broader shift in how sports organisations think about their own rulebooks. Competition engineering such as this is the deliberate redesign of a sport's rules, format or equipment to produce a better version of the game, whether that's safer, fairer, more skilful or more exciting to play and watch. Such redesigns can be employed for children's sport or at high performance levels. Too often, sports treat their rulebooks as fixed, but the GAA, to its credit, does not.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Inside Sport, chairman of Gaelic football's Expert Advisory Group Kevin McStay discusses potential Gaelic football rule modifications
The last round of competition engineering certainly worked. From 2024 to 2025, average scoring in the football championship rose from 34 points a game to 46, and has held at that level through 2026. More strikingly, the game now has room for genuinely different styles to succeed. Armagh and Donegal play an aggressive running game; Kerry look to play through the lines and Galway put a premium on physicality and primary possession. A sport that can sustain several distinct, successful approaches to playing it is a healthy one, and that variety is itself evidence that the rules changes are working as intended - creating space for creativity and innovation, rather than funnelling every team towards the same solution.
So why tinker further? McStay has been clear: "there are a few anomalies that need tidying up. The biggest issue left is the slow attacks and lateral play. They haven't totally gone away." That's a legitimate target, but it raises a question the GAA is not alone in needing to answer.
Coaching science has a long history of investigating how you fix a problem like this without creating a new one. Any conversation about rule design should start with what the rules are actually for: to let players show off skill, athleticism and game intelligence, in a way that's compelling to watch. The Sport Science Framework for Gaelic Games defines skill in terms of problem-solving: a defender has to work out how to delay or dispossess an opponent, an attacker has to work out how to create space for a score. Skill, on this view, is a player's ability to read what the game is presenting and adapt their movement accordingly.
Coaching science has a long history of investigating how you fix a problem like this without creating a new one
That definition matters, because it tells you what a good rule does and what a bad one does. A good rule changes the problem a player has to solve – it opens up new questions on the pitch. A bad rule removes the problem altogether and replaces it with an instruction.
That's the risk with a hard limit of three consecutive handpasses. Coaches routinely use constraints of exactly this kind in training – conditions like a two-touch limit, or bonus scores for a non-dominant foot – to sharpen a particular aspect of a player's game.
But coaching science is equally clear that these constraints can be overdone. As one recent paper on skill acquisition put it, a rule should invite a solution and still leave the player with a genuine choice, not force them down one specific path. The same paper singles out "the ubiquitous 2-touch rule" and "forcing players to make a specific number of passes before they can score" as textbook examples of over-constraining – rules that don't develop decision-making, they replace it.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Inside Sport, soccer player Stephanie Roche, Irish rugby union footballer Nora Stapleton and ladies' Gaelic football and hurling coach Cliodhna O'Connor share their experience of coaching in Ireland
We saw this play out recently at an U14 session where the rule of the day was three kick-passes before a score was allowed. Players who had created real separation inside – exactly the kind of space a defence dreads – had to turn down the shot and kick the ball straight back out, because the count wasn't yet at three. The constraint didn't ask a better question of the player, but forced them to give a worse answer than the player would have chosen themselves.
The three-handpass rule also has form here. A version of it was tried in the 1994-95 league and again in 2019, and it was abandoned both times. While the number of kicks increased, players, managers and match statistics suggested that the quality of that kicking did not. A hard cap on a specific action doesn't reliably eliminate slow, lateral play; it might just change what the safe, unambitious option looks like.
The best modifications pose better questions for the players on the pitch to answer, rather than restricting the answers they're allowed to give
None of this is an argument against changing the rules again. Instead, it's an argument for how. If the target is genuinely slow attacks and lateral recycling, coaching science would point towards constraints that shape the value of a decision rather than dictating the decision itself – rewarding the outcome you want (as the four-point goal already does for direct, incisive attacks) rather than counting the actions a player is permitted along the way. Constrain the environment; leave the choice with the player.
McStay is right to want to wait and see, and right to keep tidying anomalies out of a game that, by most measures, is in a better place than it has been in years. Gaelic football should keep engineering its rules. The best modifications pose better questions for the players on the pitch to answer, rather than restricting the answers they're allowed to give.
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Dr Phil Kearney is the Course Leader for the MSc Applied Sports Coaching at the University of Limerick. Luke Barrett is a graduate of both the MSc Skill Acquisition for Sport at MTU and the MSc Applied Sports Coaching at the University of Limerick, an inter-county Gaelic football coach and a teacher with the Donegal Education and Training Board.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
