All-Ireland Senior Football Championship
premier competition in Gaelic football
The All-Ireland Senior Football Championship (SFC) (Irish: Craobh Shinsir Peile na hÉireann) is the premier inter-county competition in Gaelic football. County teams compete against each other and the winner is declared All-Ireland Champions.
Organised by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), the championship has been contested every year except one since 1888.
The final is played by the 35th Sunday of the year at Croke Park in Dublin, with the winning team receiving the Sam Maguire Cup. For the majority of its existence, the All-Ireland Championship has been played on a straight knockout basis whereby once a team loses they are eliminated from the championship. In more recent years, the qualification procedures for the championship have changed several times. Currently, qualification is limited to teams competing in six feeder competitions: the finalists of the four provincial championships (Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Ulster), the Tailteann Cup holders and the best non-qualified National Football League teams entering the 16-team group stage.
Thirty-three teams currently participate in the All-Ireland Championship, with Kerry, Dublin, Galway and Cavan being the most successful teams in their respective provinces.
The title has been won by 19 counties, 18 of which have won the title more than once. The all-time record-holders are Kerry, who have won the championship on 39 occasions.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “All-Ireland Senior Football Championship” as premier competition in Gaelic football. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1474330. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1888.
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This entry incorporates text from “All-Ireland Senior Football Championship” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.