The GAA's Central Council will this weekend consider whether to retain the Allianz Football League finals and push the All-Ireland SFC final back into August.
Despite a hectic and compacted split-season calendar, it now looks increasingly likely that the four divisional finals will be retained next year.
But counties are still looking for an extra week to be found between the end of the league and start of the championship, which seems likely to delay the start of the club season.
A lengthy consultative process conducted by the Central Competitions Control Committee has been in operation over the past number of months to address this issue ahead of forming a master fixtures plan, and to glean feedback on several significant areas of the association’s administration.
Initially, it emerged that a majority of counties favoured scrapping the four league finals, with the winners instead defined by their league table placings.
This feedback led to a subsequent survey for counties to complete ahead of another Central Council meeting this Saturday.
Since that first survey, there has been a comprehensive swing in favour of retaining the finals, while a minority of Joe McDonagh hurling counties are in favour of also retaining the All-Ireland preliminary quarter-finals – which give the second-tier finalists a chance to play Liam MacCarthy opposition in the All-Ireland series.
The latest CCCC survey suggested the possibility of starting the 2024 inter-county season a week earlier, on 20 January, which would allow the league finals to be played at the end of March rather than the start of April.
The knock-on effect would be bringing the AIB All-Ireland club finals forward by a week, to 13 January, and all provincial club championships would have to start a week earlier too.
This is highly unlikely to come to pass next year as it would mean that many of this year’s county finals would have to be played a week earlier than currently scheduled.
And with those competitions already up and running, this proposal is more likely to be an option for 2025.
RTÉ Sport also understands that counties have also been asked their opinion on the prospect of getting rid of pre-season provincial competitions and, despite the pressure on the calendar, they are overwhelmingly in favour of retaining them.
So to help find that one-week gap, counties have been asked to consider the prospect of lengthening the inter-county season by seven days.
This could see the All-Ireland senior football final played on the first weekend in August. This would require a decision of annual Congress to get through. Also, being a bank holiday weekend every year, there may be logistical issues for teams to book hotels and other services around Dublin at that particular time.
Many counties have already highlighted their dissatisfaction at the prospect of prolonging the inter-county season further at the expense of the club action but it is becoming difficult for the GAA to provide an extra week between the league finals and the start of the championship without taking a week from the time allocated to the clubs.
Meanwhile, a sizeable number of respondents also looked for individual counties to manage their own flow of players between the senior and Under-20 championships instead of time-based directives on the availability of U-20 players for senior county activity.
