Saturday, March 20, 2010
THE GAA recently outlined its latest figures for attendances and revenues. As Croke Park says farewell to the Six Nations this evening, Michael Moynihan enlisted academic and All-Ireland-winner John Considine to look beyond the figures.
JOHN CONSIDINE says straightaway that his professional concerns as a professor of economics and sporting interests as an All-Ireland hurling medal-winner with Cork often intersect.
It’s just that they don’t tend to cross over on the obvious issues. Recently Croke Park held a briefing on intercounty attendances and resultant revenues, but the economist in Considine looks beyond the headlines.
"Croke Park doesn’t have a lot of variability in its income, apart from the soccer and rugby revenue.
"What’s really interesting from an economics point of view is what’s going on below that level — for instance the different hurley manufacturers, the difference between traditional hurley manufacturing methods and the new carbon fibre sticks, sliotar standardisation, helmets, hurling walls, the necessity for quality marks and standards, research into those subjects — all of that."
We’ll stay with the headlines for a moment: a couple of years ago Considine published a paper on attendances at intercounty games between 2000 and 2007 which showed some very interesting results, such as the importance of Dublin supporters to the GAA coffers; Croke Park hosting over half of the total attendance with only one-quarter of the games; and the low number of full houses at various GAA cathedrals, from Clones to Semple Stadium.
"In fairness to the GAA, they’ve become more strategic in recent years," says Considine.
"Rather than focusing on 50,000-seater stadia which won’t be filled more than a couple of times a year, there’s a focus now on provincial centres.
"Very few GAA stadia are worth building, economically speaking. Not when most county grounds have fewer than five occasions a year on which they’ll be full. That won’t pay for anything.
"If you wanted to develop, say, Páirc Uí Chaoimh, you’d want to look at something like an integrated dockland development — which was being considered at one stage. The Live At The Marquee concert series every summer attracts huge numbers — why not build that into the set-up if you were revamping Páirc Uí Chaoimh? That’s the kind of thing the GAA could look at.
"The other side of that, though, is the fact that the GAA is a cultural organisation. You don’t build a GAA ground the way they built the Emirates, for instance, to maximise revenue.
"The GAA operates differently — it would make economic sense to have a Munster football final in Thurles, say, but would Cork and Kerry supporters want to travel there?"
Culture works in a different way, however; Considine points to the effect the back door has had on marquee fixtures.
"The example of the Munster football final is a good one, because if it was on in the morning, how many people would you get to go to it? That’s changed because of the changes in the competition structure."
The UCC academic isn’t convinced of the need for sweeping national plans when it comes to developing the Association.
"I’d be wary of big plans because the problem with those is that they tend to be inflexible. Take the Mallow GAA complex — that’s down to the people who drove it, whereas if it had been designed centrally you mightn’t have had the same buy-in locally, for instance.
"That’s another one of the reasons I say some of the fascinating things that are going on in the GAA are happening at a level below Croke Park.
"In fairness to the GAA, they treated soccer and rugby money as a windfall — the Government might have taken the same approach and we mightn’t be in the state we’re in now — and now, obviously, that will stop.
"There’ll still need to be investment, though the question is how much do we need, when we have more than enough capacity at intercounty level?"
Considine’s take-home point about the GAA is a simple one.
"The GAA is not a business. It’s not like soccer. Most of the money in the GAA tends to go back into the GAA, while in soccer it goes on player wages and so on.
"After that, where does it go? In 1973 I remember my father taking me to a Cork Hibs game and the attendances for those games were huge, but where did the money go? With the GAA you can say something is left behind. It needs to be remembered that there are no shareholders waiting on a dividend, and the players aren’t being paid.
"To me the closest thing in some ways is the college system in the USA, though I know you’ll find people who question whether the players are in fact amateurs and so on.
"Another way of putting it would be that the GAA is a form of communism, really. The GAA certainly has its drawbacks. But there is an ethos that it’s about the whole rather than the individual — something that’s coming back into vogue in society generally."
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