Kerry Draw Donegal in Round 1 as Dublin Meet Louth Again — Today's Football
Kerry will play Donegal in today's football All-Ireland championship Round 1, while Dublin and Louth will meet again in the opening draw. The pairings set the first step of the 2025 campaign and fixed how the field will split after the opening round.
Kerry, Donegal and Dublin
Tom Ryan helped with the draw process that produced the first-round matchups, and the outline is straightforward from there: the eight winners move on to Round 2A, while the eight losers drop into Round 2B. That keeps every county in the championship path after Round 1, but it also means the opening result determines whether a team is chasing a direct route or a second-chance route.
Kerry’s assignment with Donegal is one of the headline ties, but Dublin’s rematch with Louth also stands out because the draw paired the sides again at the first hurdle. The first team drawn in both Round 2A and Round 2B will have home advantage, so the order of those draws will matter as much as the pairings themselves.
Round 2A and Round 2B
The format after Round 1 is split cleanly. The eight first-round winners will be drawn against each other in Round 2A, and repeats of the provincial final pairings will be avoided. The same rule applies in Round 2B, where the eight first-round losers will meet, again with provincial final rematches avoided where possible.
From there, Round 3 brings the four losing teams from Round 2A against the four winning teams from Round 2B. The four Round 2A winners go straight to the quarter-finals and sit out Round 3, before meeting the four Round 3 winners in the quarter-final draw.
May Schedule For Counties
The timing is fixed too. The eight games will be staged over the last two weekends of May, with the first-round ties involving the four Munster and Connacht counties played on May 23rd and 24th. The Ulster and Leinster deciders are on May 17th, and the first-round games involving the four Ulster and Leinster counties will follow on May 30th and 31st.
The final will be played on Sunday, July 26th, so the Round 1 draw has already set the opening route through a championship that moves quickly from first-round pairings to quarter-final places. For Kerry, Donegal, Dublin and Louth, the next step is not a vague wait for the bracket to settle; it is the first weekend in May when the opening games begin to split the field.
