Irish Sport Manager

The county is yours. So is the blame.

You're the bainisteoir. Not a chairman, not a director of football. The one in the county jacket on the sideline, appointed by a board that expects a championship and will settle for a decent run at it.

There is no transfer market. Every player you can pick plays for a club inside your county. You get the thirty you get, and you answer for the ones you leave out.

Four codes, one sideline

Pick your code. The other three keep running on the same calendar, with the dual players and the fixture pile-up that comes with them. You manage one. You can look in on the rest.

The season as she is played

January's pre-season cups in football and hurling, province by province. A league where your division pays the bills and the table decides where you'll be next year. Provincial championships, then the summer, shaped by the code: round-robin groups in some, and in football the 2026 format, where one defeat won't end your summer before the quarter-finals. Four national finals, one for each code, at the National Stadium in Dublin, which holds 82,500. Level at the end of a championship knockout and you go to extra time, then to penalties.

Match days you actually manage

Watch it live. A ticking clock, and the whole match played out on the pitch, every score as it happens. Make your switches while play runs. Burn your subs early if you have to. Pick your moment for the speech at the break, and stand over the result after.

A system, not a formation

Eight levers: your restarts, your shape at the back, the press on theirs, the tempo, the half-backs, the half-forwards, the defensive line and the tackle. Every one of them buys you an edge in one place by paying for it somewhere else.

Name a free-taker, a long-range option, a target up front. Put markers on up to six of their players, tight or goal-side, and find out whether your marker is the kind of player who does that job. Change it mid-match and it takes hold at the next passage of play, not the second you click.

You pick from what you have

Players come up from the county's own clubs. Surnames that belong to a place, a Power where the Powers are from. Call a club player into the panel. Teach a corner-back to play midfield if that's what you're short of. Watch the training injuries. Answer a disciplinary charge inside two days or the proposed penalty stands.

What you know about a club player is what your selectors have seen. If nobody has watched them, the numbers in front of you are a guess.

The officials, the press and the dressing room

Every match has a named referee, and each one has a way about them: strict or lenient, swayed by a crowd or deaf to it. The big days go to the senior panel. Protest a call from the sideline and you may finish the match in the stand.

After the big days the press want a word: about a standout, a hammering, a row with the referee. After every match your coach reports what worked, what didn't, and what to change.

A quiet word

Praise a purple patch. Demand more from a player in a slump. Reassure the one losing every Sunday to the panel. Argue over a dual player's weekend with the other code. Talk somebody out of the boats for one more winter.

One word a month with each player, so pick it.

The county happens to you

Between the Sundays the post arrives. A wedding the night before a championship match. A J1 summer in Boston. The river in the street and the parish out with sandbags. A greyhound running Thursday.

Ten days to answer, and the answer runs through everything else. Write your own events in plain JSON and put them on the Workshop.

The name on the door

There's no official license here. The governing body in the game is the Home Games Association, the HGA, and the competitions, trophies and venues are its own. The counties are real and so is the calendar. The parishes are real places. The clubs and the players are invented.

Careers with consequences

Board confidence, sackings, and the job market that comes after them. Have a good year and another county's board makes a quiet call. Have a bad one and the press ask whether your position is tenable.

A cup buys you time. It does not buy you the job.

Irish Sport Manager is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or licensed by the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Ladies Gaelic Football Association, the Camogie Association, or any county board. All governing bodies, competitions, trophies, venues, clubs and players in the game are fictional.