Evaluating Individual Impact in Team Sports
Whose point was that, really?
Kerry’s opening score in the All-Ireland final looked simple on the big screen. A clean run, a neat lay-off, Paudie Clifford with the vision, David Clifford with the finish, or in this case, Cillian Casey ghosting through and clipping it over. Textbook. But rewind the tape and it turns into a case study in how impossible it is to judge individuals in a team game with any real certainty.
Kobe McDonald did what he was told to do. He tracked Casey from deep, followed him stride for stride until the halfway line – and then hit the brakes like Wile E Coyote at the canyon edge. He couldn’t afford to breach. The system said no. Ahead of him, Eoin McGreal hovered, body turned towards Paudie Clifford, back to the ball, because that was his priority. Jordan Flynn picked up Casey’s run for a beat, then peeled off when the ball moved, going to hunt the carrier instead.
Casey didn’t stop. Clifford found him. Kerry got their point.
So who, in the cold light of an All-Star meeting, wears that? Should a Mayo teammate have dropped off to free McDonald so he could keep tracking? Should another man-marker have rolled across to Clifford? Should Flynn have stayed with Casey once he engaged him? And if you’re prepared to pin that moment on someone, what does it do to their candidacy for an individual award?
These are the margins that make All-Stars both compelling and fundamentally flawed. They are why every final selection leaves someone unhappy. It isn’t a formula. It’s a judgement call, coloured by angles, replays, and the human tendency to search for a neat explanation where none really exists.
Every winter the same suggestions land on the table. Bring in more current players and managers. Lean harder on the numbers. Give extra weight to league form or early-round heroics in the championship. All of it springs from the same obsession: the hunt for the one thing.
Players crave the one thing that nudges them into a starting 15 or lifts them from very good to undeniable. Managers chase the one thing that will make this season different from all the others that ended in regret. Journalists, pundits, supporters – they want the one thing that explains why a game tipped one way and not the other.
But games don’t work like that. Seasons don’t. Careers certainly don’t. A tidy, single-factor explanation makes for a sharp line in a column or a handy soundbite, yet the truth is far messier. A mind-bending number of elements feed into what we see on a Sunday, and they all sit in the room when All-Stars are handed out.
The numbers try to help. They really do. But the way we collect them in the GAA is skewed. Most of what’s recorded happens on the ball: kickout wins, shots, scores, assists. Clean, countable actions that fit neatly into a spreadsheet and a TV graphic.
Those stats can shape a conversation. They should. Context still has to sit in the chair beside them.
Take Mayo’s assist charts from the 2026 championship. The top line is shared: Ryan O’Donoghue, Kobe McDonald and Jack Carney all finished level as leading providers. Just behind them sits Sam Callinan, credited with creating 13 points. He also scored with the only two shots he took.
For a man named at corner-back, how heavily does that weigh? How much should it?
There are defensive metrics too – tackles, turnovers, pressure acts. Some counties now log “breaches”, the moments when a defender is beaten either by his man or by the ball. Those numbers are slow to gather, harder to standardise, and rarely make it beyond internal reports. They’re not as glamorous as a scoring chart. They don’t trend.
Matchups complicate things further. How often have you heard it said that Jack Coyne held his direct opponent scoreless from play in his last four outings? It’s a powerful line. It sounds definitive.
Then you go back over the final. Coyne started on Dylan Geaney. McGreal went to Paudie Clifford. By the middle of the second half, both Geaney and McGreal were off and Coyne was the man now shadowing Clifford.
Kerry’s last point tells its own story. Clifford took possession outside the D, squared Coyne up, shimmied twice and slipped past him on the left before sending the ball over. One moment, one score. It doesn’t erase Coyne’s season. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t worthy of recognition. But it does put that “scoreless from play” claim under a harsher light.
This is the modern game. It leans towards the attacker. Rules, conditioning, systems – they all tilt the pitch slightly in favour of the man with the ball. For defenders, success often means damage limitation, not total denial. Bend, don’t break. Hold the line, even if the scoreboard ticks.
And within that, their responsibilities shift constantly. Call a switch. Drop into space. Track a decoy runner so someone else can double the danger man. None of it shows up cleanly in a box score.
Look at David McBrien. He struggled at midfield against Roscommon. He had serious problems with Bobby McCaul when Mayo met Monaghan. Louth’s Ciaran Downey clipped 0-4 directly off him. On paper, that’s a red mark.
Yet so much of McBrien’s brief lives in the collective. He doubles up. He drops as a sweeper. He organises the cover in front of the D. In the All-Ireland decider, he played himself into the conversation for Player of the Match. How do you square that circle when you sit down to tick names on a ballot?
Then there are the bodies held together by tape. How much sympathy, or extra credit, does Matthew Whittaker deserve for playing through injury for large chunks of the season? What weight do you give Jordan Flynn’s sheer work rate in a midfield that, at times, looked like it was fighting a tide on its own?
On the other side, Paudie Clifford’s year came in waves. Eight championship games. Across the final three, all in Croke Park, he hit 0-13, with 0-9 from play. That’s elite, big-stage production. Yet earlier in the summer, against Cork, Donegal and Armagh, various issues clipped his wings and dulled his influence. When you’re ranking him against others, which version of Paudie carries more sway – the early stutters or the Croke Park surge?
No one is arguing the system can’t be sharpened. For the Tailteann Cup Team of the Year, players and management submit their own XVs to feed into the process. That kind of peer input could easily be expanded.
A mid-championship stocktake would help too, a formal check-in that stops the early rounds from fading in the glow of Croke Park. Sponsors could go further and commission an independent data report from an analysis firm such as GAA Insights – not to replace human judgement, but to sit alongside it, to give selectors another lens and supporters more ammunition for the rows that follow.
Because in the end, everything sits on the table. The numbers. The matchups. The roles within systems. The injuries carried. The moments that defined games. The form spikes, the slumps, the intangibles that everyone senses but nobody can quite quantify.
There is no pristine answer. No model that spits out a list and silences the barstools.
And maybe that’s the point. If you pretend it’s simple, you’re not just fooling yourself. You’re short-changing the very players the awards are meant to honour.
