FAI Scraps Aligned Football Calendar Plan for Irish Football
The FAI quietly killed one of the biggest ideas in Irish football last week. It did so with the kind of language that belongs in a quarterly report, not in a game that lives and dies on muddy pitches and crowded touchlines.
Buried halfway down a carefully neutered statement about “key priorities” and “strategic planning”, the real news finally surfaced: the plan to align all levels of Irish football to the same calendar has been scrapped.
Or, as Abbotstown now prefers to put it: “The Aligned Football Calendar has been reprioritised and will not be considered a deliverable within the Football Pathways Plan or the FAI’s current 2026–2029 Strategic Plan.”
In plain speech: it’s dead.
A grand plan, slowly strangled
The aligned calendar sat at the heart of the Football Pathways Plan, the blueprint drawn up by former director of football Marc Canham. He arrived from the Premier League with a polished CV and a big brief – to work out why Irish football keeps tripping over its own feet.
The conclusion was blunt. Irish football wasn’t getting enough football out of its own players. Kids were playing, on average, only about 30 weeks a year. Not because they didn’t want to play, but because the pitches were waterlogged and unplayable for long stretches of winter.
The solution seemed obvious. Shift the whole game – from kids’ leagues to the top – onto the same calendar as the League of Ireland, into the better weather, by 2028. More football under the sun. Fewer Saturdays lost to flooded goalmouths and abandoned fixtures.
It was also a move toward basic coherence. Ireland is the only one of UEFA’s 55 member nations running different calendars for different levels of the game. The Pathways Plan tried to end that anomaly.
This wasn’t some backroom sketch. The FAI said the final plan came after 11,000 hours of consultation, much of it through roadshows around the country. Those at the grassroots, though, didn’t always buy the sales pitch. One story from a Cork roadshow lingers: Canham, the man from the Premier League, being asked if he knew anything about silage. The subtext was obvious. Do you really understand how football actually works here?
His finished plan, ironically, wanted to move football to silage season.
A vote won, and then ignored
The FAI board didn’t hesitate at the time. It unanimously endorsed the blueprint, aligned calendar and all, then went looking for a mandate from its members at a General Assembly.
They got it. Barely.
The plan squeaked through on a slim majority, with the professional and League of Ireland bloc heavily marshalled. The vote was quickly cast as partisan, the LOI side accused of carrying the day while being insulated from many of the practical headaches the change would bring.
Still, a vote is a vote. FAI president Paul Cooke stood in front of the room and praised the delegates for “changing the face of Irish football”.
But the rebellion outside that room never stopped. Grassroots leagues pushed back, complaining of poor consultation and warning that the new calendar would drive players into the arms of Gaelic games. Some elected directors began to feel the heat. The blazers started to itch.
Canham walked away in April last year, saying he would never again work in grassroots football. His grand plan was already limping by then. The FAI allowed leagues to apply for a two-year delay before moving to the new season. The message was clear: the mandate was conditional, the resolve soft.
His successor, John Martin, made his position plain in his first media briefing earlier this year. He wouldn’t be mandating anything. The aligned calendar, once the central plank of the Pathways Plan, was now an optional extra in theory and a dead letter in practice.
Last week’s statement simply made the burial official.
Fear, factions and a missed chance
Not all of the opposition came from a bad place. Many volunteers on the ground genuinely worried about losing players to the GAA if football moved deeper into the summer. Yet those fears ignored a few awkward facts.
Twenty-two of the 69 FAI-affiliated leagues already run on a calendar season, and the sky hasn’t fallen in. Local co-operation can ease clashes with Gaelic games. Leagues were to be given the flexibility to pause competitions or introduce alternative formats around peak holiday periods.
It would have been messy. Change always is. But it would have meant more football, more often, for more children.
There were romantic objections too. The old rhythm of football returning with the school year, the sense of autumn Saturdays and new boots. That nostalgia glossed over the reality that some current winter leagues themselves used to play in the summer, before the GAA ended the Ban and the cultural fault lines shifted.
Once, Irish football could point to the GAA’s dominance and cultural weight as a ready-made excuse for its problems. That crutch has gone. The aligned calendar wasn’t sunk by outside forces. It was dragged under by the FAI’s own factionalism.
On one side, the amateur game. On the other, the League of Ireland. Each peering suspiciously over the fence at the other’s motives. The Leinster FA wrote to the FAI board complaining about a “flawed voting procedure”, arguing that the LOI side – “not directly impacted” by the change – had forced it through. That line landed even though their own elected representative on the FAI board had backed the plan.
The result is stark. The FAI commissioned a plan, unanimously approved it, took it to its members, won a mandate to implement it – and then walked away from its key recommendation.
A governing body at war with itself
This is more than an internal policy tweak. It cuts into the credibility of the FAI’s entire decision-making structure.
The General Assembly vote, the same mechanism recently held up as proof that Irish football stood behind the decision not to boycott fixtures against Israel, has now been shown to be negotiable. If a vote can be quietly overridden when the noise gets too loud, what does the mandate actually mean?
This is a governing body that still struggles to agree with itself, never mind lead the sport beneath it. It talks in the language of strategic plans and deliverables while the people who actually line the pitches and wash the kits argue over whether anyone in Dublin really understands what happens on a wet Tuesday night in January.
And the children at the centre of all this? They are the ones who will sit inside again this winter, watching rain streak down the window while their pitches lie empty and unplayable.
Irish football has decided that this is in their best interests. Better for nobody to play at all than risk some of them deciding, given the choice, that they might rather play something else.
