GAAconomics E-Book

Michael Moynihan

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

A unique sports book which will ensure you never again look at hurling and football the same way. Michael Moynihan talks frankly to current and recent players and gets the inside story on how money courses through the GAA. The greatest amateur sports association in the world? Michael Moynihan takes a look behind the scenes to reveal the truth about the GAA and looks for answers to the awkward questions. Why won't hurling and Gaelic football become professional? What would it cost to complete Croke Park? What's the economic benefit of winning an All-Ireland? What would it have cost the GAA not to host rugby and soccer? Who gets paid? What are the spin-offs for players? And, by the way, what county supporters really bring their own sandwiches to the All-Ireland final?

Leseprobe

For Marjorie, Clara and Bridget

CONTENTS

Cover

Title page

Dedication

Introduction: Thoughts from the Dismal Science

Part One: Cash Flow

Chapter 1. The Significance of 80 per cent: the Bottom Line

Chapter 2. The Great Secret Springtime Revenue Generator

Chapter 3. The Pa Dillon-Bob Dylan Conundrum: Concert Revenue

Chapter 4. The Name Above the Door: Stadium Naming

Chapter 5. All those Breakfast Rolls Add Up: What the GAA Does for Local Economies

Part Two: Premises

Chapter 6. Broadway and Wall Street in One: Croke Park’s Value to the GAA

Chapter 7. Completing the Horseshoe: Covering the Hill and the Five Grand Chicken

Chapter 8. Why Sell to GAA People? Profiting from Big Game Tickets

Chapter 9. Cultural Stereotypes: Who Brings their own Sandwiches to Croke Park?

Part Three: Personnel

Chapter 10. The Necessity of the Commercial Agenda: the GPA

Chapter 11. What an Old Guinness Ad Tells You about GAA Players

Chapter 12. Why the GPA Sees Itself as a Bulwark against Professionalism

Chapter 13. Can Hurling Become More Popular?

Chapter 14. The Commercial Pressures on Referees when it Comes to Late Equalisers . . .

Chapter 15. The Kerry Packer Scenario

Part Four: Commercial Partners

Chapter 16. Super Sunday on the Way: Media Rights I

Chapter 17. A Marriage of Like Minds: RTÉ and the GAA: Media Rights II

Chapter 18. When Sports Success is Bad for Business: Anatomy of a Sponsorship

Chapter 19. Beyond the Border: Popularity Outside the County

Chapter 20. Breakfast of Champions: How Much for a Player to Endorse your Product?

Chapter 21. People, as They’re Also Known: the GAA Fan as Consumer

Part Five: Internal Challenges

Chapter 22. A Different Hymn Sheet: When the GAA Disagrees with Itself about Money

Chapter 23. Paying for the Biscuits: the Cost of GAA Justice

Chapter 24. Like a Different Country

Chapter 25. Paying for Failure: Managers

Chapter 26. Fixture Migraines: the Influence of the Outside Manager

Chapter 27. When Championship Restructuring Ceases to be a Conversation Killer

Chapter 28. The Expense of Ecumenism, or Why One-Code Counties Do Better

Chapter 29. The Paid Official

Part Six: External Audit

Chapter 30. The Most Significant Purchase in GAA History

Chapter 31. Does Lottery Funding Lead to All-Ireland Success?

Chapter 32. An Agnostic’s View of GAA Funding

Part Seven: The Local Franchise

Chapter 33. Some Just aren’t Going to Survive: the Club in the Future

Chapter 34. Splits Needed: Why Superclubs are Bad News for Dublin

Chapter 35. Why the Spectrum of Concern Means a County Board Spending Cap is a Good Idea

Part Eight: Future Outlook

Chapter 36. The Don Draper Approach: Rebranding the GAA

Chapter 37. Europe, Nowlan Park and the New Demography: Challenges and Left-field Answers

Chapter 38. Conclusion: Value for Money?

Images

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill & Macmillan

INTRODUCTION

Thoughts from the Dismal Science

Unique in its voluntary ethos, an organisation dedicated to recycling any money it raises to spread the gospel of hurling and Gaelic football, handball, camogie and ladies’ football, a vast, selfless family of like-minded individuals all working together for the greater good of the Association as a whole.

Or a vast, rapacious empire of warring groups and factions, each trying their best to outdo the others in order to rake in some of the enormous amounts of cash rolling around the organisation, all gathered under a veil of shamateurism and hypocrisy.

Your viewpoint probably depends on whether or not you are a card-carrying member of the Gaelic Athletic Association, but even then there are nuances. Many die-hard GAA people would be unhappy with the organisation’s attitude towards money, whether that applies to ticket prices or player endorsements, funding the Gaelic Players’ Association (GPA) or opening Croke Park to rugby or soccer.

With that in mind, this book looks at the tension between two realities: the GAA’s sports mission, which centres on participation in amateur sport, and the financial reality that goes along with generating vast amounts of money all over the country.

First stop, then, a couple of economists.

——

John Considine lectures in the dismal science at University College Cork. He pinpoints that tension between the commercial imperative and the organisation’s mission: “Nobody gets rich working for the GAA, basically. The bottom line regarding the GAA’s role is games development, so as a result it engages in practices that you’d have to say in economics terms, ‘you could do better’.”

Jim Power of Friends First is a well-known economic commentator across a range of media platforms, and he echoes Considine. “I think those two areas come into conflict now and again, but I don’t see it as a perennial problem. Looking at All-Ireland final day or Munster final day there’s no conflict whatsoever. You have a sporting occasion that gives the GAA maximum positive advertising, puts the Association in the shop window—and is totally economically viable for the GAA. The conflict comes with activities which the GAA must engage in to keep it in the shop window, or to promote games or to advertise and market games. There are some activities the GAA engages in which make no economic sense whatsoever.”

Eamon O’Shea is a professor of economics at the National University of Galway who feels that tension is “generally managed well” by the GAA.

“Within the context of the GAA you have the quasi-professionalism of the game at county level, and the amateur aspect of the game everywhere else,” he says. “Obviously it’s quasi-professional because there’s a lot of revenue generated over the summer in the championship, and from the top league games. The sustainability of that, given the current structure . . . everything’s more professional now with paid physios, paid trainers, paid psychologists, paid doctors. You also have bureaucrats paid at the top end, and in between you have players and managers, and even there some managers are being paid. So that’s one obvious tension.

“The other tension relates to the money generated, how that trickles down. I don’t have evidence that that isn’t happening, and all the evidence that is there suggests that it is—that it does trickle down—but how and where that money trickles down is an interesting question.

“There’s also an interesting demographic tension in that the GAA is essentially a rural organisation which is trying to catch up with an urban demography. That’s going to be very interesting in the sense of how resources are channelled, how structures are set up—even how matches are fixed. One of the obvious things is that if you fix games in urban environments you’re more likely to get people to come, whereas in rural environments they have longer distances to travel—as basic as that. There’s a whole raft of interesting issues like that within the GAA.”

——

Okay, I cheated a little bit.

Jim Power is a well-known economist, but he is also a die-hard Waterford GAA supporter who is heavily involved in that county’s supporters’ club. John Considine won All-Ireland medals with Cork as a robust corner back before becoming a respected coach at all levels within his home county, serving as interim senior manager in 2009. And finally, Eamon O’Shea is a former Tipperary hurler widely regarded as one of the finest coaches in the game and generally credited with Tipperary’s dazzling display of attacking hurling in their All-Ireland final victory of 2010. As the book went to press he was installed as senior hurling manager in the Premier County. Of course, if you’re a GAA person you knew all of that already.

Power brings a personal resonance to the tension we mentioned within the GAA. “Where that tension happens, primarily, is with kids, and I’ve seen examples with my own kids,” he says.

“When they got old enough they played in the Cumann na mBunscoil finals in Dublin, which every year is played in Croke Park. Now it makes no economic sense to the GAA to open up Croke Park for kids like that, but letting them out on the field there to play is something that they’ll never forget. That encourages kids to go on and play Gaelic games, so it makes sense in terms of retention of kids.

“But then one year one of my sons was on the team that made it to the final, and the game had to be moved from Croke Park to Parnell Park, because there was a concert in Croke Park. The kids were unbelievably disappointed, because playing in Croke Park was the pinnacle for them, and I felt that the kids’ place should not have been affected by blatant commercialism which was outside the realm of sport within the GAA.

“The GAA has to keep its focus on the product first and foremost in my view, and that’s sport. The product will be more and more successful the more people participate. I think the key for the GAA is to get more and more people participating, as far as that’s possible: if that means turning down commercially lucrative opportunities like concerts, I think that’s a price worth paying. Concerts come and go, but get a kid playing GAA and you’ll have him for 20 years. Or longer.”

O’Shea sees the tension breaking out in his overview of the GAA’s economic mission, and in particular its use of its resources. He feels one of the GAA’s biggest challenges, for instance, is in coming to terms with the actuality of urban life.

“Look at a place like Knocknacarra, where I live in Galway. There are 10,000 to 12,000 people there and I don’t think the GAA is tapping into that resource fully. The structures set up to generate competition within these areas . . . rather than having one superclub, if you had several small clubs feeding into one elite club, but in general I don’t think the GAA understands the dynamic of urban living, of urban choices, or the priorities of families when it comes to pastimes, priorities which are very different to families in rural areas.

“I think the GAA is only playing catch-up in that context in terms of organisational frameworks and supports. Dublin has been successful in developing hurling because it recognised the need for facilities, for floodlit hurling, to structure the games in order to have consistent matches and all of that. I don’t know if that’s the case in counties which are dominated by a rural landscape and a rural ideology.”

For his part, Considine crystallises the tension within the GAA by using the example of supporters’ clubs, and how those function with counties, for instance, in comparison with professional sports organisations.

“I don’t see any downside in supporters’ clubs unless they’re taking money from the county board itself, and I couldn’t see that happening. The funny thing is that for a professional outfit a supporters’ club is a bit of a drain, while in the GAA they’re there to help the sports team. On balance I think most people see them as more positive than negative.”

Considine dwells further on the GAA person’s double-think: “As an economist I don’t favour tax breaks for GAA players, for instance, because they’re not mobile. The point in giving the horse-racing industry tax breaks is to encourage owners to keep their horses in Ireland. That’s not the case with the GAA players’ tax break. As a person who likes sport, though, there’s a part of me that says, why shouldn’t sports people get a piece of the action; everyone else is. And as an individual GAA person, if you gave me the choice of playing an All-Ireland in front of 100,000 fans and a million on TV, or in front of nobody, I’d take the former.”

Okay. You’ve paid your money and the ball’s been thrown in. Enjoy the game.

PART ONE: CASH FLOW

Chapter 1

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 80 PER CENT: THE BOTTOM LINE

This is what the GAA brings in. The 2011 season, the last year for which figures were available, showed an overall drop in revenue of €11 million, down from €58m in 2010 to €47m in 2011, but the decrease was foreseen and planned for and could in part be attributed to the loss in revenue—€4m—from the rental of Croke Park to the FAI and the IRFU in 2010.

Gate receipts from Central Council games showed a drop of €2m, attributed to price reductions and the International Rules Series being played in Ireland the previous year, while attendances at championship games were down by just 2 per cent.

The average attendance at championship matches in the All-Ireland series showed a minimal decline, dropping from a 2010 average of 16,900 to 16,300 in 2011, while total attendances for Central Council games rose by 10 per cent at €1.2m.

Revenue from GAA football championship games was down by 10 per cent, while income from the GAA hurling championship increased by 4 per cent; attendances in the Allianz Football and Hurling Leagues increased to 369,000 in 2011, with revenues growing by €0.7m to €3.5m, with the Dublin Spring Series, which was played at Croke Park, driving that increase.

A decrease of €4.5m in commercial revenue to €15.2m was down to ten fewer Championship matches being shown live on TV in 2011 and the shorter reporting period, 1 January 2011 to 31 October, as opposed to the full calendar year in 2010. At the same time, indirect costs dropped by €1.3m to €6.7m and the costs of staging competitions and matches fell by €1m.

Finally, approximately 80 per cent of all revenues was recycled directly to other units within the Association, with Central Council distributing €37m in funding during 2011, while there was an investment of €9m in games development. “When you take a number of factors into account,” said Tom Ryan, the GAA financial director, “around 86 per cent of the revenue that people pay at the turnstiles when they go to see a match is recycled within the Association.”

A few months after his presentation of the figures, Ryan settles down to give an overview of the GAA’s finances. “Recent years were probably distorted by the soccer and rugby games in Croke Park. In terms of funding the GAA works off gate receipts, sponsorship, broadcasting money, State funding and business activities within the stadium (Croke Park), but the first three are the big ones in terms of scale. Attendances have held stable, but the money we make out of that is dropping because of price reductions, season tickets, packages—and that’s not an accident. We’d have deliberated on that and decided that it was important to keep people in the habit of going to games. In marketing terms it’s far easier to keep people than it is to win them back.

“When you think of the couple of million attendances at games over the course of the year, I don’t know if we can tell exactly whether that’s a smaller number of people going to more matches. That means if you lose a few people it can have an exponential effect on attendances.

“I accept there are any number of costs on top of ticket prices, too. If you have kids you’re familiar with the experience of bringing them to a game with €60 in your pocket and when you get home that’s gone, and you’re not sure where it went. Because of those costs, I’m not sure if cutting ticket prices further would have much of an impact. For instance, we cut the prices of early-round games last year compared to the latter end, but our figures show that attendances are good later compared to those early games. That isn’t done solely to boost attendances, though; without sounding corny, it’s genuinely being fair to people, because if their county makes it to an All-Ireland semi-final it could be their third or fourth outing of the summer. Out of fairness to them, it doesn’t cost us a huge deal to take a fiver off the ticket price for a first round game.”

That economic driver for the GAA—bums on seats—is viewed by Ryan as the “best barometer for everything else”. You’ve got to keep them, as he says. Not only will you turn off your own consumers pretty quickly if you mess up, the other revenue streams feed directly from the atmosphere provided by big crowds.

“The number going has held up pretty okay, but it’s a hard job to keep the equilibrium there. Certainly you’d be worried if we got something wrong in that regard, say, in terms of prices, venues or competition structure, that what you’d lose would be difficult to get back. That can happen. People can recall sports that were very popular in terms of spectators—snooker was huge when I was in school, but I couldn’t name three top snooker players now.

“People want to go to games—you only have to look at the early-season competitions, the O’Byrne Cup or the Waterford Crystal or whatever. The weather’s not great and you have lads playing that you may not see in the county jersey again, but people want to get out to see the games. You can’t be cynical about that, and if you took advantage of that financially with people, while you might benefit for maybe a year or so, you could do a lot of damage. All the other stuff is directly related to the games: sponsors wouldn’t be interested, for instance, if the stadium is half-empty. Neither would broadcasters. So a lot hinges on attendances.”

And here the tension between the economic imperative and the GAA’s games promotion objective comes into view. Ryan admits that when he watches the championship draws in the autumn, he’s doing a little mental arithmetic at the same time. “Even in the 2013 championship draw you’d have half an eye on the financial return: you’d have Cork-Kerry in the football in Munster, a good opening game in the Ulster championship—that kind of thing—even if it’s not the way you should be watching the championship draw.”

Hang on a second, though. If you’re the GAA’s financial chief, surely it’s incumbent on you to view those fixtures through the prism of your day job, even if that sums up the tension between the day job and the fan’s interest in the games coming down the line? “Tension’s a good way to put it because there are a lot of inherent contradictions. The whole thing is volunteer led and community based, and we’re not here to make a profit, but at the same time if you started work on a Monday morning thinking, sure it doesn’t matter if we make a surplus or not, you wouldn’t be around too long. If we were all laissez-faire it wouldn’t work, because everything we’re trying to do needs resources. Money. We have to find a balance between making a profit and keeping true to your ideals, and what you’re there for.”

That sounds like a professional approach with a small ‘p’; later in the book Dessie Farrell of the GPA says the GAA will need to be professional in its approach to preserve its amateur ethos, and Ryan acknowledges the point.

“If you interpret professionalism as running things properly, in the right way, then that’s the way everything has to be run, down to your own club, never mind the GAA as a whole. That’s a world away from professionalism as many people understand the term, but it’s a good discipline for the GAA to have.

“For instance, if you were interviewing people for a job in Croke Park, it’s nice if the successful candidate has an interest in the games—and most of them do—but you wouldn’t be doing the GAA a service if you awarded the job to the biggest hurling fan you interviewed rather than the best-qualified accountant, for instance.

“The other side of that is that you can find yourself telling GAA people how to run things, and these are people whose spare time, whose family time, is being affected by their voluntary work, and you can sense there may be a little gap between Croke Park and the club man. It’s something I’d love to get rid of.”

There are other issues he’d like to address. When the ticket price for the 2012 All-Ireland hurling final replay was cut from €80 to €50, it meant the excitable prediction of a €5 million windfall from that replay had to be revised downwards. Not that they were accurate to begin with, he says. “It wouldn’t be anything like that, even before you factor in price reductions for tickets and so on,” says Ryan. “An All-Ireland final is worth—purely in terms of admissions and tickets—about €4 million. When you cut prices, as we did for the replay, then the gross out of the replay is about €2.5 million. There’s a big cost in running it. There are plenty of expenses involved, and at the end there’s €1.5 million to €2 million out of a replay. Now it’s great to have, and it’s obviously not something I’d ever complain about, but in realistic terms it’s not going to transform everyone’s fortunes overnight.”

And in terms of that old urban legend of GAA referees being under orders to create lucrative draws? “People have this kind of notion that referees play for draws, something that’s died out a little in recent years but which was suggested for years. You’ve had plenty of one-point games in the last few years which disproved that, and I think the figures show that on average there are only two draws a year in the big inter-county games. To be fair, I think you tend to hear that only from people who have little or no interest in Gaelic games, so it’s not as if it’s worth engaging in; anyone with even a passing familiarity with hurling or football doesn’t really buy into that.

“But even with our own constituency we have to lay out what we expect to make and what we intend to do with that—if only to temper people’s expectations. Otherwise people would think ‘this is open season’.”

For all that, Ryan doesn’t detect much Grab-All-Association cynicism directed towards the GAA these days.

“I don’t, really. I think—I’d like to think—that there’s a perception out there that we run things okay. But I think we can be a little paranoid about that kind of thing ourselves. One thing we can say is that coming from my background, preparing accounts and presenting them, so far, the GAA is the most transparent place I’ve ever been. It has to be, because it’s nobody’s money except the general membership.

“The other side of that, though, is that it’s not what most people are interested in. The figures are published ad nauseam, but whether people trawl through them all, I don’t know. That’s not a reason not to publish them, and you’d hear at times about how other sports treat their figures, but that’s not something that I think we should be doing, measuring ourselves against other sports. You’re good at what you do. You stand on your own merits and they are the best games in the world and so on. If you believe in what you’re doing, then it doesn’t matter what anybody else is doing or saying.

“To be honest, it’s something that annoys me at times about Irish life in general—not just the GAA—this constant looking over the shoulder at what the English are saying about us, or what these other people are saying about us. Why should we care? Everything we bring in is accounted for. If we give a club €50, it’s down in black and white. The truth is that that can be a head-wrecker, preparing accounts to that level of detail, but it’s also something to be proud of, to be open to that level of scrutiny.

“At every Congress we’ll spend two or three hours going through the figures with people and I accept that that’s not the most scintillating topic. I appreciate that, but it’s important to be able to say that you do that.”

Of course, the fact that members of the media wouldn’t be the most numerate with lengthy balance sheets isn’t a help. “That’s the way of the world,” he says. “My own interests are in Gaelic games and you could say that what I’m doing is a poor substitute for what I’d like to be doing games-wise!

“I don’t expect people to slaver over the numbers; I know that what we do is the kind of thing that only gets headlines when it goes wrong, frankly. If it goes okay then nobody’s that interested, which is fine by me.”

Chapter 2

THE GREAT SECRET SPRINGTIME REVENUE GENERATOR

One of Tom Ryan’s parting comments is about the national leagues, which is surprising. When it comes to less attractive siblings, the national leagues leave the ugly sisters in the ha’penny place.

Grim locations, small crowds, bad weather. Every year it yields a nice end-of-year photograph or two, and that’s about it: a few stewards wrapping frozen fingers around mugs of tea, or a couple of hardy souls huddling from a hailstorm under an underused scoreboard. All that remains of a dismal Sunday afternoon.

Even the managers and players can barely hide their true feelings about the competition. The expression ‘league is league, championship is championship’ rotates heavily in the early months of the year, with a heavy bias towards the attractiveness of the championship. If teams make it to the semi-finals, fair enough. They’ll try to kick on and collect a medal, but by the same token, almost every year a couple of sides ‘train through’ and abandon any pretence at competitiveness as long as they’re not relegated. Every now and again a couple of counties will forget themselves and serve up a private exhibition of high scoring that leads to a brief ripple of optimism, but seasonal torpor and the fact that many long-serving players take a springtime break from the treadmill ahead of the grounds hardening usually reasserts itself.

Despite all of that, county boards try everything to get the crowds through the turnstiles. Free entry for kids, ticket packages, marching bands, pop groups—see Dublin’s innovative Spring Series, which featured Jedward at half-time one year, which certainly lowered the average age of those in attendance—but people refuse to love the league, it seems. The visual contrast between the grey terraces speckled with hardy souls in anoraks and the shirt-sleeved multitudes baking under the championship sun can’t be overstated.

Oddly enough, they should. Because, as Tom Ryan said, it’s good news financially for their county after all.

——

It was a run-of-the-mill press call in Nowlan Park, where Kilkenny were extending their association with Glanbia and Avonmore.

Brian Cody and some of his players were present and one of them, Jackie Tyrrell, pinpointed the attraction of the league for administrators when asked about a new six-team format. On the playing side it meant few games for managers to try out new players and Tyrrell, one of the more thoughtful players around, threw out some boiler-plate about managers being less keen to take risks with selection as a result. Then he added, as an afterthought: “If you look at it from a county board’s perspective it’s less revenue.” Tyrrell was correct. County boards don’t like seeing any revamp of league structures which means fewer games, because it hits their bottom line.

John Considine managed the Cork senior hurlers for a couple of league games before returning to the Department of Economics in UCC. He points out that county boards do better out of the drudgery of the league than the dazzle of the championship. “You get a greater return for the league games than you do for championship games. Munster final revenue goes to the Munster Council and the same in other provinces, while All-Ireland final revenue is redistributed around the Association.”

But how does that break down? While writing this book a resurgent Cork, under returning icon Jimmy Barry-Murphy, played Waterford in front of a crowd of over 7,000 in the hurling league. Ger Lane of the Cork County Board crunched the numbers. “Well, it doesn’t go to the county board directly from the game,” says Lane. “The county board gets a fee for hosting the game and the rest is pooled with all the other gates for the league, and whatever the total is, you get a percentage refunded: in 2011 our accounts showed Cork’s share to be €120,000 approximately from both hurling and football.

“It’s one of the biggest revenue generators for county boards. Take the Munster championship. You get a flat fee to cover your expenses for the game unless you’re hosting it, in which case you get a fee for renting the stadium. That’s a major source of finance as can be seen in our annual accounts—€180,000 in 2011, while it was €340,000 in 2010 when we hosted extra games. People wonder why county boards are so keen on hosting games, and that’s why. It’s a lucrative business. If Cork were playing Kerry in Fitzgerald Stadium in the football championship, and playing hurling in Thurles, then obviously we’d benefit far more from the league games, as the venues benefit largely in championship games.”

That may not quite fit with the image of thousands of supporters converging on a provincial final or semi-final, but it explains why county boards love the league, if nobody else does. It also goes some way to explaining county boards’ interest in the sharp end of the league. “It’s why counties are always very keen on progressing to the semi-finals and finals of the national leagues, as the bigger the attendance the more the county gets in gate returns from headquarters,” adds Lane.

“We beat Dublin in the league final last year, and that’s the kind of opposition everybody wants, because they’ll fill Croke Park and consequently the percentage of the gate is very valuable. In general terms the income for the 7,000 people you might have at a national league game would be greater than the income for a Munster championship game in Thurles, say, where you’re bringing maybe 20,000 Cork supporters to Semple Stadium and you get a few thousand euro to cover your team costs. The money generated at Munster Championship games does come back to clubs by way of grants, by the way. It doesn’t come back into the county board accounts, but 37 Cork clubs received over €325,000 in 2011, and money redistributed to Munster clubs over the last five years is in excess of €7.5 million.”

Laudable, but isn’t there one potential problem here? Surely when it’s more profitable for a county board to progress in the league there’s a temptation for the county board to put pressure on the manager to win games when he might want to use some of those games for experimentation in selection? “The potential exists,” says Lane, “but in my time involved, while privately board members might say ‘that’s not a very strong team going out today’, there wouldn’t be a case where a member would influence the manager—nor would a manager accept it. We appoint the management and we stand by that. And of course you also have the case nowadays that most teams want to make the knock-out stages because they can see there’s a benefit to the team later on in the championship.”

There’s another twist to the attitude to the national league. Why don’t some counties move games out of the big county grounds to maximise attendance? Wouldn’t they draw bigger crowds at some smaller venues and get more money, a better atmosphere and a better chance of winning the game in question?

“I’d love to see Cork play a league game in Mallow, or in Clonakilty,” says Lane. “My understanding is each county must name three county venues suitable for hosting inter-county games and in our case those would be the two stadiums we have in the city, Pairc Uí Chaoimh and Pairc Uí Rinn, and Fermoy.”

Yet some counties see an obvious benefit in utilising less central venues, to put it politely. The usual example cited here is Monaghan, and as a liaison officer with the Cork senior footballers, Lane is familiar with the backroads of Patrick Kavanagh country.

In many counties, visiting teams are often brought out to rural grounds, and nobody would be surprised if the county board had done some kind of deal with the venue for the rent. To many observers it makes sense to have a couple of games brought to the people, rather than the public being asked to come to the city. A couple of years ago Liverpool drew 7,000 people to Dunmanway for a soccer game, for example, and many observers on Leeside believe that if an intercounty league game in Mallow or Clonakilty were properly marketed, that it would draw the same type of crowd, never mind the inevitable promotion dividend for the game in that area. Venues vary widely. One observer who has accompanied the Cork senior football team on many journeys around the country points out that they’ve been to some venues around the country which look positively shabby in comparison with the Mallow GAA club complex, for instance. All of that without taking into consideration the inevitable benefit to the home side of playing a game in an environment hostile to the visiting team. Anyone who’s been to Scotstown in Monaghan when the supporters there are clung up to the wire will acknowledge that their presence in that setting was worth something to the Monaghan team.

There’s also a little-known but potentially enriching sideline when it comes to hosting games, one which could be used to sweeten the deal needed to facilitate a game being moved away from the main county ground. Elsewhere in this book you can read about the future of match-day information, the possibility of downloadable apps which will inform you of team selections, but in the meantime . . .

“Don’t forget, by the way, the venue could make a lot of money out of the programme sales alone,” says Lane. “That’s very lucrative. That’s worth a lot. If you had 5,000 people at a game you’d sell 2,000 programmes and that would earn €4,000 to €5,000 for the venue. Programmes earn a lot of money. The City Division of the GAA in Cork has been stood down, but they had made serious money over the years—all hard earned—from programme sales. You could produce a programme for 50 to 75 cent a copy and sell it for €2: there’s a big profit margin. The rule of thumb is generally that you’d sell one programme to every third spectator, but that can change with a smaller event. Why is that? A junior or intermediate county final between two teams who’ve never reached that level before, or rarely, then you’d sell programmes to two in every three spectators because they’d want a souvenir of the occasion. You’d often have people even coming along afterwards looking for programmes for that reason.”

Considine, speaking from experience, concurs with Lane on the issue of pressure on managers to select teams specifically to advance to the knock-out stages of the national league. “I don’t think there’s a manager in the country who would care about that. If they felt playing every league game behind closed doors would help them winning the championship, they’d do it, not to mention the positives from winning league games. I’d say you wouldn’t need all the fingers on one hand to count the inter-county managers who would be aware of the breakdown of league revenues per county; you wouldn’t need the remaining fingers to work out how many of them cared about it. Where there could be greater pressure on generating money would be in promotion, particularly with counties with supporters’ clubs. There could potentially be pressure on players turning up to meet sponsors and so on, though I’ve not heard of that happening.”

So managers are like the rest of us: resistant to the league’s dubious charms. It looks like it’ll have to keep relying on that small audience, county board treasurers all over Ireland, to make up its fan club.

Chapter 3

THE PA DILLON-BOB DYLAN CONUNDRUM: CONCERT REVENUE

The collision between cutting-edge music and the GAA, in terms of concerts held in GAA grounds, has provided some handy copy for journalists over the years. It’s not so very long ago that Bob Dylan was due to play Nowlan Park, Kilkenny, and the then-county board chairman was asked for his views on the sixties troubadour. “Ah, I’d be more of a Pa Dillon man myself,” said the chairman, referencing the Kilkenny defender who created an environment around the small square in Nowlan Park that was a good deal more hostile than the mellow vibe engendered by Bob’s musical stylings.

Then there was the time that Prince was bringing his purple self to Pairc Uí Chaoimh back in 1990. When it was explained to a member of the Cork County Board that the little man’s stage show was on the raunchy side, the reaction was immortal: “We are going to have to sit down around the table with Prince and discuss this.”

They never did, which is unfortunate on every level you can think of, obviously. If they had to meet nowadays, though, there’s every chance that Prince would use the very thing which has hurt the GAA concert concept more than anything. The M8.

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One of the men involved in Siamsa Cois Laoi sketched the commercial background to that short-lived musical festival for us under strict conditions of anonymity.

“There was a particular arrangement that time under which the venue owners were guaranteed their cut no matter how many came along,” he said. “That was obviously very attractive at the time, and maybe it’s something you could hammer out in a deal even now, but something that militates against doing something similar is the quality of the road from Cork to Dublin, oddly enough.

“There was a time that road was so bad people wouldn’t travel it for a midweek concert because they couldn’t face driving back down again. Nowadays you’re in Dublin from Cork in two hours and a bit, so it’s no hardship. What that means is that people are willing to head to Dublin for a concert, and promoters know that. Why risk a band in Cork or Limerick or Galway when you can pitch the O2 or some other venue in Dublin to them and you’ll get a bigger crowd?”

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With Croke Park, stadium director Peter McKenna has a different focus. The venue may appear to have the upper hand, but it must also maintain its brand value. “Well, the promoter takes the risk. That’s how we have our deal structured. Having said that, if you had a whole string of poorly attended events the whole thing would fall off very quickly. I think Croke Park is one of the top five outdoor concert venues in Europe. Everybody wants to play here. They love it; they love the atmosphere. Westlife and Take That had their concerts filmed here. Billboard voted us the number one concert venue in the world after the U2 shows. So we’re up there.

“Only a handful of bands will fill the stadium, but we’ll only look for a handful of bands. We have a pre-eminent position for concerts. They work well; we do it well; the quality of the facilities, the ease of getting in and out; the sheer size of the place. That all ties in together and everyone comments on it, saying Croke Park is number one. Slane, Lansdowne—none of them comes close.”

There’s one little-known factor which can affect the bands playing in Croke Park. In testimony reminiscent of the Cork County Board’s interest in hauling Prince before its General Purposes Committee, McKenna admits that the GAA has the power of vetoing acts or bands. “We would have a veto if we thought the act was unsuitable. We’ve never had to use that and I couldn’t imagine the circumstances in which we’d have to use it. The promoter, effectively, comes to us and says, this is what I’ve got lined up, we agree dates, and it takes off from there. Twenty years ago some acts might have been on the edge, but not now. I couldn’t see that being an issue. We do insist on having an Irish act on the bill, mind you, as we see ourselves as promoting Irish music.”

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For the GAA outside the capital the pickings are a bit slimmer because they’re in a Catch-22 situation. On the face of it a middle-ranking act or two might fill a stadium like Salthill or Walsh Park, but for stadiums like the Gaelic Grounds or Thurles you’re talking about a band or singer who can pull 50,000 people through the gates.

“There’s more to that than meets the eye, though we’re exploring this option with the Gaelic Grounds,” says Enda McGuane, then deputy CEO of the Munster Council. “Timing has a lot to do with it. The need for finance within the GAA is greater because of the decline in revenue from other sources, obviously, but the difficulty is that concerts are now being hit as well. Advance sales are under pressure.

“If you go back three years you had a huge festival like Oxegen which might sell out in 35 minutes as soon as the tickets went online. That doesn’t happen any more. We see it ourselves. We see that people won’t buy tickets well in advance because they want to wait and see if they have the cash to go to the gig—or if there is a cheaper option that weekend. So concerts aren’t as viable as they were a couple of years ago.

“The other thing to bear in mind is that the level of expertise needed to run concerts has moved on hugely. Structures have changed and the days of guaranteed money are gone. It’s not as lucrative as it used to be, and you’re also handing over the management of the event to an outside agency. By their nature the acts you’re looking to bring in are international acts, so you’re going to have to go through a promoter, which will hit your costs.”

There’s also the small matter of the people who live near the stadium. As McGuane puts it, they may be willing to tolerate the occasional crowd filing past their front gates on their way to a hurling or football game, but thousands of drunken teenagers present a different threat to the prize rose bushes in the front garden.

“There’s the planning, and people’s willingness, or lack of same, to accommodate it. It’s one thing for people who live near a stadium to have a game for a couple of hours with some cheering the odd time on a Sunday afternoon or Wednesday evening, but it’s another thing to have it all day. People mightn’t be as willing to accommodate that. And that would probably be an issue anywhere. Once people hear about concerts and kids running riot, they’ll think, ‘Well, do we want that?’”