FAI Abandons Aligned Football Calendar Plan
The fog around Gianni Infantino’s war with the game still hadn’t lifted last Friday when the FAI slipped out a statement. On the surface, it was the usual corporate hymn sheet: “key priorities”, “further boost”, “strategic planning process”. The kind of language that fills a page while saying almost nothing.
Halfway down, hidden beneath the jargon, lay the real story.
The plan to bring every level of Irish football onto the same calendar has been scrapped.
“Following the strategic planning process, 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.”
Executives get to talk like that. Managers don’t. No coach can look a dropped player in the eye and tell him he’s been “reprioritised”. Yet plenty of Ireland’s more direct, route-one managers would recognise the clarity of what the FAI have really done here.
They’ve launched this particular political football into the stand.
A grand plan, then a retreat
The Aligned Football Calendar sat at the heart of the Football Pathways Plan, the grand design overseen by former director of football Marc Canham. He was the man entrusted with the long, meandering search for Stephen Kenny’s successor, but this was supposed to be his real legacy: a structural reset of Irish football.
The FAI said the final document emerged from 11,000 hours of consultation, much of it through roadshows around the country. PowerPoints, microphones, hotel function rooms, endless questions. The whole thing had the air of a national listening tour.
Canham arrived with an immaculate CV from the Premier League and the wider English game. It didn’t always land. At one such event in Cork, he was asked if he knew anything about silage. The question wasn’t really about grass. It was about roots.
His central idea? Move the entire football calendar to silage season.
Ireland is the only one of UEFA’s 55 member associations running different calendars at different levels. The proposal was simple in theory: by 2028, everyone would fall in line with the League of Ireland’s summer schedule.
The logic flowed from a stark conclusion. Irish football is not getting enough out of its players, especially its youngest. One of the core problems: kids don’t play enough. Seasons average around 30 weeks a year. The rest of the time, the pitches are waterlogged, locked, or simply unplayable under winter rain.
So the plan was obvious. Shift the bulk of the game into better weather. Put more football under the sun.
It did not survive contact with the real world.
A narrow vote, a long rebellion
Grassroots leagues reacted furiously. Many claimed they hadn’t been properly consulted at all. Despite that, the FAI board unanimously backed Canham’s blueprint and then sought to wrap it in legitimacy by putting it to a General Assembly vote.
The plan, including the aligned calendar, scraped through by a slim majority. Those numbers came with an asterisk. The victory was widely seen as partisan, driven by a whipped professional/League of Ireland bloc.
Still, a vote is a vote. From the podium, FAI president Paul Cooke hailed the delegates for “changing the face of Irish football”.
The rebellion didn’t stop. It shifted. Into letters, phone calls, meetings in back rooms and committee corridors. It also shifted into discomfort among some elected directors, who suddenly felt the heat from the people who put them there.
Canham walked away in April last year, promising never to work in grassroots football again. That was a line in itself. The FAI then blinked, allowing leagues to apply for a two-year delay before changing their season.
By the time his successor John Martin faced the media earlier this year, the tone had changed. He made it clear he wouldn’t be forcing anything on anyone. The calendar, once central, was already on life support.
Last week, the FAI quietly turned off the machine.
Genuine fears, missed opportunity
Plenty of the opposition to the aligned calendar came from an honest place. The loudest worry? Losing players to Gaelic games. The idea of football moving into what many see as GAA’s natural territory spooked a lot of people.
Those fears ignore the evidence already on the ground. Of the 69 FAI-affiliated leagues, 22 were already running summer seasons. The sky hadn’t fallen in. The GAA hadn’t swallowed them whole.
The plan also built in wriggle room. Leagues could pause competitions for summer holidays, run alternative formats, and tailor schedules to local needs. It would not have been painless. There would have been rows over pitches, referees, and dual players.
But the trade-off was simple: more weeks, more games, more kids actually playing football.
There were softer, cultural objections too. Some didn’t want to break the old rhythm of football returning with the school year, the familiar sense of autumn boots on wet grass. That nostalgia overlooks the fact that some of today’s winter leagues actually played in summer before the GAA ended the Ban.
The old enemy is no longer the main problem.
A house still divided
Where once Irish football could blame the GAA’s cultural power for its troubles, it now has to look inward. The aligned calendar didn’t die because of weather, or the GAA, or a lack of ideas.
It died because of the FAI’s own fault lines.
On one side, the amateur game. On the other, the professional and League of Ireland wing. In this case, the amateur side roared back, convinced that the whole project had been foisted on them by “that lot” in the League of Ireland.
The Leinster FA even wrote to the FAI board, condemning what it called a “flawed voting procedure” and arguing that the plan passed only because of LOI votes from people “not directly impacted” by the change. This, despite their own elected representative on the FAI board backing the plan.
Strip away the statements and the spin and the picture is stark. The FAI commissioned a plan, backed it unanimously at board level, took it to their members, won a mandate to implement it – and then walked away from its key recommendation.
This is a governing body still arguing with its own reflection.
It also leaves the General Assembly mechanism badly weakened. That same process was recently cited as proof that Irish football stood behind the FAI’s decision not to boycott fixtures against Israel. If a democratically endorsed calendar can be quietly binned, what does any future vote really mean?
Winter comes, again
Soon enough, the rain will come back. It always does. Pitches will close. Fixtures will pile up in the mud, then be abandoned altogether.
On those winter weekends, when your kids are stuck indoors watching the weather hammer the windows instead of a ball across a pitch, remember this moment.
Irish football had a chance to give them more time on the grass. It chose not to.
Better, it seems, that nobody plays at all than risk a few deciding they might rather play something else.
