Gavin Cooney

WE HAVE PREVIOUSLY warned on these pages that the columnist must be forever vigilant against the creep of nostalgia, as it rises like a mouldy damp to mantle our brains and tint our vision. 

But we are confident we are not confining ourselves to the class of old men who yell at clouds when we say that we can take no more.

Please, for the love of God, stop changing the formats of our greatest competitions! 

The formats of virtually all of the biggest events in our calendars have radically changed in the last few years, and with the honourable exception of the Munster hurling championship, all have changed for the worse. 

As an opening thought experiment, ask yourself the format of next year’s All-Ireland senior men’s football championship?

And once you’re baffled by that, ask yourself the format of the championship just gone?  Bet you can’t remember how the quarter-finals worked either. 

Meanwhile, having miserably failed to expand their sport, World Rugby have picked the easy route and decided to expand their World Cup. The 2027 draw took place this week, two years out from the tournament – or, as World Rugby call it, the 11th Hour – and it has now expanded to include an additional knockout round. While this is good news for Ireland’s ambitions to actually win a knockout game at some point in the future, it renders the pool stages even more of a time-sink than ever before. Where before there were a couple of games on which progression hinged and jeopardy existed, the pool stages are now solely a seeding exercise for the knockout rounds. 

(The draw has at least kindled bombast in Irish rugby again, with the same voices preaching apocalypse after Ireland’s defeat to the Springboks now coming out with lines like, ‘We won’t meet South Africa until the final.’ Bar a few extreme weather days, Rugby Country has a fundamentally optimistic climate.) 

Rugby’s reformatting follows the ironclad of all format changes: it must be changed to accommodate bloat. Fifa’s next World Cup is an obvious example, where from 32 teams in the micro-state of Qatar we move to 48 teams and 104 matches across three countries and four time zones.

Uefa are in this business too, given the European Championship has expanded to 24 teams while the Champions, Europa and Conference Leagues have all added teams under the new, ‘Swiss style’ format. 

That Fifa and Uefa have each thrown out the simplicity and beautiful symmetry of their 32 and 16-team formats is an act of vandalism. These formats were established and easily understood: the top two in each group will progress to the next round, where a group winner will face a separate group’s runner-up. 

It was thus straightforward to understand the importance of any group game at a glance, and it was easy to map the rest of the tournament in one’s head. That is now impossible. Hell, newspapers will have to hire architects to design the wallchart of a 104-match World Cup. 

Uefa have also expanded their Nations League, which has led to this insane situation in which Ireland now find themselves, sharing custody of a ball titled ‘European Play-Off D’ in today’s World Cup draw. That there hasn’t been time to complete the full line-up of a tournament that happens once every four years in time for its draw is a farce.

All of these format changes diminish their respective sports by limiting jeopardy and simply confusing the rest of us as to why the hell we should care about any particular game. 

The new format of the Champions League et al has been a success in making boatloads more money for clubs, but they have also reduced football to mere passive entertainment. No human brain has the capacity to retain in real time the permutations of a 36-team table, and the effect of this has been to unmoor the games from any kind of context and present themselves as nothing more than Something You Might Flick On; the wallpaper of a winter evening.  

You might be given a reason to be entertained by it… but you’re not instantly given any real reason to care about it. 

Uefa and Fifa have at least been fiddling from a position of strength. Universities will soon be offering PhD theses on the latest format of the dejected Heineken/Investec/European Champions Cup, which has become less consistent than Matthew Carley around a blatant head contact. 

The format has been tinkered with so much it now resembles the car from which Fr Ted tried to tap a dent. The tournament’s only remaining annual tradition is now that Munster will at some point play Castres (17 January this time, if you’re asking). 

And in its grand tradition of its unfathomable formats, this year’s is a doozy, whereby teams have been drawn into pools with teams they will not actually play. 

Any competition which cannot easily explain its format to even the laziest of bandwagoners should be going back to the drawing board, given the oft-maligned bandwagoner is, in reality, the economic engine of all these events. The complexity of these formats is also alienating to kids, whose gateway drug to sports are the aforementioned competitions. The separation of third-placed sides according to goal difference or disciplinary record ain’t going to win many hearts and minds. 

This ceaseless tweaking is largely a product of greed: more competing teams means more matches which means more money. Once they guarantee the cash, sports governing bodies will reverse engineer their events from there. They also speak to many of our sports administrators, who do not have the humility to leave well enough alone, and feel their genius justifies the continued hacking away at precedent and tradition. 

As it stands, our competitions are demanding unsustainable levels of mental energy to merely figure out what is happening at any given time, and what is actually riding on a particular game. If you’re explaining, you’re losing. 

The formats and structures of our greatest competitions should be readily accessible to the top of our heads, because we should be able to easily contextualise any game we sit down to watch.

That is no longer the case, and this is yet another realm in modern life that is turning out to be much, much more complicated than it really ought to be.