By John Harrington

Football Review Committee Chairperson, Jim Gavin,  outlined the work his committee will undertake in coming weeks and months to support the introduction of the new playing rule enhancements that were passed at Special Congress.

The ongoing education opportunities around the rule enhancements include an E-Learning course and an updated FAQ section on the GAA website which were launched today.

To access the E-Learning course go here – https://learning.gaa.ie/node/289161

To access the FAQ section go here – https://learning.gaa.ie/FRCFAQ

The FRC has already supported an in-person briefing with the National Referees Panel and Support Referees and on January 3 will hold a challenge match with the National Referees Panel in attendance.

A workshop will then take place at half-time and after the game where the referees will have the opportunity to discuss anything related to how the rule enhancements were applied in a live match situation.

On January 8, the FRC will hold a briefing with Provincial and County development staff on the rollout of the new rules and planned coach education.

On January 13, the FRC will support engagement with provincial and county staff with upskilling of the delivery of course for the new rules.

The following day the FRC will brief the National Referees Panel again and throughout the month will also support the National Referees Committee who will act as mentors to referees during inter-county challenge games.

The FRC and provincial and county staff will commence the delivery off face-to-face New Rule Enhancement and Coach Education Workshops and will also continue to provide support to inter-county and club teams when requested.

The FRC have also established a ‘Games Intelligence Unit’ which, through the use of a benefits realisation framework, will monitor, track, and collect data to allow an assessment of how the new rule enhancements translate into real and measurable improvements to Gaelic football.

Starting from the first round of the Allianz Football League, the Games Intelligence Unit will gather performance analysis metrics such as number of kick-passes and hand-passes, contests for possession, scores, and scoring opportunities and compare them to previous inter-county seasons.

The physical demands of Gaelic football played under the new rule enhancements will also be measured against data from previous seasons.

County teams will feed their player GPS device information to a data controller in the Games Intelligence Unit who will anonymise it so the metrics that will be made available to the public within 72 hours of each weekend of fixtures will be representative of the whole rather than on a county-by-county basis.

“We need to engage with the counties and say for the benefit of this we need to get raw data,” said Gavin. “I won’t know who it is, it simply goes into what’s called a data controller in the Games Intelligence Unit. They then crunch the figures.

“We’ll know it’s a Division 3 team but we won’t know what team it is. We need to work together on that to protect the integrity of one, the player, from a GDPR perspective. I’ll have signed a NDR (non-disclosure agreement) that even if somebody did tell me I’m not going to tell anybody. We just need to respect that.”

The FRC will also collect quantitative and qualitative data through a QR code survey at every intercounty Allianz Football League and Championship match next year from players, match officials, team officials, county officials, and spectators.

Such data will also be collected through online forms for club competitions for all grades and ages.

Based on the findings of the Game Intelligence Unit and the insights gleaned from this data, the FRC will be able to propose modifications to the rule enhancements on an ongoing basis throughout the 2025 season if required and that work will continue going forward through the Games Intelligence Unit.

“When the work of the FRC is done and complete, this Games Intelligence Unit will still be there to analyse games and see are the rules being sustained over time,” said Gavin.

“The rules will probably have to be modified in some ways over the coming years for whatever reason, perhaps as teams adapt a rule as it was intended isn’t working any more so the Games Intelligence Unit will have the data to measure it and to make proposals.

“We’re going to use a number of tools and are quite advanced, we’ve had a number of meetings over the last while and we will announce the people we have on board in January.”

It was also confirmed today all the new rule enhancements will be in place next year for club and county underage games down to U14.

At U13 the new arc will be much smaller so it will be easier to kick two-points.

The Solo and Go will be added to the Go Games (U12 down) list of rules.

The National Development Committee issued a statement today that said: “We would encourage counties to test the new rules. When we have clear empirical evidence about the impact of the rules on underage competition, we will formally feed those back to the Football Review Committee.”