There is no comparison between Kobe McDonald and David Clifford - except in one vital respect

Anybody seen a ticket for the All-Ireland final? As in, the digital ticket you claim on your phone? For anyone who has clawed their way across the bodies in the past fortnight to get a hold of one, there’s something striking about the design. One player from Kerry, one from Mayo, facing off across from each other, eyes a-bulge, fists a-clench.

No prizes for guessing the Kerry player. David Clifford, three-time Footballer of the Year, six-time All Star, leading scorer in the 2026 championship and, essentially, the GAA’s one and only true megastar. In the opposite corner, an 18-year-old boy who is about to play in just his 10th senior intercounty game. But you’d be slow to hand up prizes for anyone guessing Kobe McDonald’s name

If you stand back from it at all, it feels a bit silly putting the pair of them in the same sentence. This isn’t the Clifford-Kobe final. Finals don’t work like that, for one thing. The last time Clifford went head-to-head with another star forward in an All-Ireland final, Shane Walsh had his greatest ever game, should have been Man of the Match and still it wasn’t enough for Galway to win in 2022. Mayo don’t want a Clifford-Kobe final. Only one winner there.

Presumably, then, it wasn’t by accident that Jack O’Connor began the week by making sure there’d be headlines featuring both of them. “Kobe McDonald is the nearest we’ve seen to David Clifford,” O’Connor said at the Kerry press event last Saturday. “He’s the Mayo version of David Clifford.” O’Connoris heading into his ninth final and he’s seen every sort of reaction to the biggest day in every kind of player. Kerry lose nothing pumping the Kobe hype, just to see how it lands.

[ Jack O’Connor: ‘Kobe McDonald is the nearest we’ve seen to David Clifford’Opens in new window ]

Thing is, when it comes to football, the comparison doesn’t really hold. As players, they’re apples and oranges. McDonald wears 15 but he’s not an inside forward, or at least not exclusively one in the way Clifford is. He gets out and about, roaming the Mayo attack looking for work, joining in the festival of piggery around kickouts and trying to run the legs off whoever’s tracking him.

Clifford does none of that. He’s strictly a pounds-and-pence man, a glutton for scores whose interest rarely extends far beyond the feeding trough in front of goal. He needs four points on Sunday to pass Colm Cooper on the list of all-time championship scorers, leaving only Cillian O’Connor up ahead of him. Even if McDonald spent his whole life in a Mayo jersey, that’s not a list anyone has in mind for him.

So they’re different folks, painting with different strokes. But as phenomena? As vessels for hopes and dreams? As once-in-a-decade faces that jump out from the crowd and demand the attention of the wider public? There’s a line to be drawn there all right.

Your mam has heard of Kobe McDonald. Could she tell you who the Mayo captain is? Could you tell her? Jack Coyne has many admirable traits but it’s not his face on the All-Ireland final ticket. For all of Jack O’Connor’s mischief, he’s probably not far from the mark on this point at least – the hype around McDonald hasn’t really been seen since Clifford was coming through.

Everything McDonald is dealing with now, Clifford had to find his way through back then. In January 2018, The Mayo News did one of those look-ahead prediction pages for the sporting year to come. Its reporters were asked to name who they thought would be the 2018 Footballer of the Year. One of the names? David Clifford, who had yet to play a minute of senior football for Kerry.

There are other parallels too. People forget now the extent to which Kerry GAA was on high alert back then over the threat of the Aussie Rules whalers coming with their harpoons and dragging Clifford down south. On the morning of the 2017 All-Ireland minor final, the official AFL Twitter account posted a link with the title: “David Clifford, an 18-year-old Gaelic footballer, will come onto the radar of several AFL clubs.”

It linked to a full story on the official AFL website, lamenting the fact that Clifford, “considered the game’s brightest talent in many years”, would likely prove “hard to prise from home”. If the intent was to unsettle the young Kerry prince, it didn’t work. Clifford famously scored 4-4 in that final, his last ever game before becoming a senior footballer. But it had plenty in Kerry spooked – Tomás Ó Sé brought it up that night on The Sunday Game.

“Now this tweet here,” Ó Sé said. “Look, I don’t mind if David Clifford gets offered a way to go out to Australia. But I don’t know why they’re tweeting about it. If the guy goes, he goes. I don’t know who’s driving it.

“But this is a guy who the AFL have apparently not tapped up yet, but the AFL are tweeting about him tonight, writing articles about him. There obviously is interest out there. I hope he stays at home for the good of Kerry football, but you can’t force a young fella to stay at home.”

History tumbles through itself. We think of Clifford and McDonald as stars now but we forget that they’ve been who they are from the start. Skim back through the local press from when they were young and it’s all there, pregnant with the future.

Clifford was sprinkled through the Kerryman in the summer and autumn of 2012. There he is, player of the tournament in the under-14 section of the Killarney Athletic seven-a-side soccer in July. There he is, making his first appearance in Croke Park with Fossa in a Munster activity day in August. There he is, scoring three points to help Fossa to an Under-16 East Kerry league title in November, still only 13 years old.

Clifford made his championship debut for Kerry on June 3rd, 2018. A week earlier, McDonald won a north Mayo Cumann na mBunscol title with Crossmolina NS, scoring 2-2 in the final. A few months before, he was shooting buckets with Crossmolina Tigers as they won the Mayo under-12 boys basketball final. That October, he was in midfield for Kilmurry as they lost the Mayo under-12 soccer final on penalties.

Both of them have carried all of this since they were no age, is the point. Funny enough, age is a notable point of difference between them. Clifford was born on January 22nd, 1999, whereas McDonald was born on December 8th, 2007.

Before ever there was talk in sports science of relative age effect or biological maturation selection biases, everyone knew the difference between a good GAA baby and a bad GAA baby. Born in January? Good. Born in December? Tough road ahead. Making what Kobe McDonald has achieved so far in his very short career all the more admirable.

As ever with GAA records, it’s close to impossible to nail these things down. But at the very least, it’s reasonable to assume that at 18 years and 230 days, McDonald is one of the youngest male players ever to appear in an All-Ireland final. Certainly in modern times, he has very few analogues. Colm Cooper, Patrick McBrearty and Finnbarr Roarty were all 19 in their first final, Con O’Callaghan was 21. Clifford himself was 20 for his first decider in 2019.

Whatever happens, here and into the future, Kobe McDonald’s debut season in a Mayo jersey has been a streak across the sky. Clifford’s was too, remember. He was Kerry’s only All Star in a poor 2018 season and won Young Footballer of the Year despite not getting past the All-Ireland quarter-final. The Mayo News was only out by the “young”.

It’s so rare that it happens like this. Young players come through every year in every sport, their reputation sent ahead of them. Mostly, they take months to find their feet, to understand the grooves and the angles, to work out their rhythm and understand that they can be themselves. Clifford got it straight away in 2018. Kobe has done the same in 2026.

Lucky us, who get to cherish it while we have it.

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