GAA director general Tom Ryan warned the spend on inter-county teams would have to be curtailed in the years ahead.
In the GAA's Annual report, it was disclosed that the collective profits of county boards had nosedived in 2024, down to €1.8m from €4.1m in 2023, with the sharp fall largely attributed to the spend on inter-county set-ups.
The cost of preparing inter-county teams came in at €44m for 2024.
Speaking at the launch of the report, Ryan said it was the responsibility of both counties and the GAA centrally to help curtail inter-county spending and admitted that it was a trend that needed to be tackled in the next decade.
"That's a responsibility that sits jointly between counties and ourselves," Ryan said of the inter-county spend.
"A lot of it will be around a common commitment we have with the GPA at the moment, around contact hours for players and making the lot of players a bit more reasonable. That's not purely from a cost point of view, it's from the point of view of the effort they have to expend to reach the level they're at now.
"It's difficult to see how the level we have now, where that's going to take us in 5-10 years time if we don't arrest it.
"So, what it means is: Spending less, expending less effort, a collective acknowledgement on the part of everybody that we centralise procurement and put some of the burden on this table here (Central Council), whether that be travel or related ancillary services around times. It just means thinking about things differently.
"If I knew how we were going to solve it, it would have been solved by now.
"There's an awful lot that's really, really good about the inter-county season. We need to be careful that we don't damage it when we undertake that.
"But we're at the stage now where if we're still having the same conversation in five or 10 years, it'll be too late, really.
Asked whether the GAA was going to develop tools for enforcing a spending limit on inter-county set-ups, Ryan said it was something they should add to their 'arsenal' in the future but cautioned that the assocation hadn't a great track record in this area so far.
"Up to now, we've tried to convince people of stuff. Cajole people. Incentivise. In terms of carrot and stick, we do a bit more carrot than stick.
"But I think that probably needs to be in the arsenal going forward. How you enforce those things in a voluntary setting, that's really, really difficult to do.
"What's more important is the collective buy-in from everybody. From all counties and the decision-makers in counties.
"The stick part, you've seen it before. Team holidays, going overseas. Some counties didn't really comply with that. Some of them did. Some of them were penalised unfairly.
"We don't want to have an environment where the people who do their best to comply but fail are penalised and others just go under the radar and are able to continue what they've been doing before.
"We don't have a great track record in terms of enforcement. But it should be in the arsenal."
In the report, Ryan suggested that All-Ireland finals could be pushed back into August, arguing that such a move "would be no bad thing."
However, he stressed that any changes to the overall calendar would be marginal and that September All-Ireland finals were likely a thing of the past.
"Where we are with the shape of the season is where it's going to be for a period of time," Ryan said.
"There will be changes around the edges, peripheral kind of changes. For All-Ireland finals, we'll look to go to a replay rather than the extra time. We want to build in some capacity for replays at provincial final stage. All of those are marginal changes.
"I think All-Ireland finals are going to be in the summer for the foreseeable future. There may well be some scope to stretch things out a little bit. But really that's all we're talking about.
"If you look at the sea change that we've undertaken over the course of the last three years, I don't personally foresee an opportunity or an appetite to go back to what we had before, because all the things that it (the split-season) has yielded are very, very valuable.
"We have to be open to the idea of changing things, sometimes those things come at a cost. But I think our job is to forge a summer All-Ireland tradition now.
"(It'll be) changes around the edges, to bring in a little bit of breathing space between games. Ger (Mulryan, GAA financial director) talked about the impact that it has undoubtedly had on attendances.
"There's a pinch on people going to matches. It's difficult for everybody to get to every match that they want to go to, quite apart from affordability and so on.
"So we have to make room for a little bit more space within the footprint that we have. I don't think what we will be doing is extending that footprint significantly back into autumn."
