New thinking required to reach global audience

I am back in touch with Eamonn Gormley because he is coming out with a book that is as clear-eyed as his passion about the potential for the GAA overseas.

That’s a rare mix because often the very thing we love about the games — the frenetic pace and occasional lack of nuance — infects how we perceive football and hurling and indeed how we try to explain them to less fortunates.

Gormley, you might recall, is a Silicon Valley Armagh man who has applied his expertise to all levels of the association out that direction: PRO and chairman of San Francisco GAA, PRO for the North American County Board and founder and chairman of the National Collegiate Gaelic Athletic Association, which will bring their national championship to New York at the end of May.

Gormley was inspired to sit down and pen Waiting to Launch: The Untapped Global Potential of Gaelic Games, because of the time he continues to spend observing first-time viewers of Gaelic games. They were fascinated by what was on display — we’ve all been there — but their intrigue is rarely seized upon because of what he views as a natural but institutional myopia bred by the high-octane, high stakes of championship summers.

“The book’s basic premise is that the GAA is falling unbelievably short of its international potential,” Gormley told me by email on Monday. “Gaelic games are languishing in obscurity, but it does not have to be like this.”

He says he has spent a decade trying to promote the game when every single person he spoke to had to be told the whole story from the top. He is also frustrated by the common attitude that Americans wouldn’t be interested in the game.

“I know this to be mistaken because of the success of Milwaukee hurling which has over 300 members and little or no Irish involvement. Ditto for Indianapolis and the explosion of new Gaelic football clubs in Galicia and Brittany.”

Of course the key issue is a pertinent one — the decision expected soon on overseas television rights. He notes in his introduction that the GAA could surely find a larger worldwide audience for All-Ireland finals than the two million average tuning in these days.

“Awareness of our games has to be improved by getting onto mainstream prime time television, presented in the local language, in a manner that makes sense to first-time viewers,” he says.

He believes the GAA should purchase air time and pay for production, pointing out that Major League Soccer used to pay networks to broadcast its games but recently sold three years’ worth of broadcasting rights to NBC for $30 million (€21.8m).

It’s extremely ambitious but even switching gears to head in that direction could make a significant change. But he sees a deeper rooted reason for why the likes of me lack that ambition.

“British sports became global powerhouses because non-English people adopted them when they spread internationally. Gaelic games also spread internationally via the Irish diaspora but Irish communities had a tendency to keep the games to themselves, stunting their growth.”

Meanwhile, he points out by further comparison, sport in America took off on an independent evolutionary path, creating a completely different sporting environment.

This latter phenomenon is what he describes as North American sporting exceptionalism and maybe, like all exiles from Ireland to America, we fall into the trap of applying that exceptionalism back to our own sports. There are brass tacks here too, like his suggestion to structure competitions according to local sporting norms.

“Successful international sports are governed by a world federation with affiliated national governing bodies,” Gormley adds. “The GAA is governed by a ‘national’ organisation in one country with affiliated units elsewhere labelled as ‘counties’ and ‘provinces’, even though their territories cover parts of countries, entire countries, and even spanning continents.

“It’s almost as if our structures were designed to be as impregnable to outsiders as possible. There should be a national governing body for Ireland that deals with Ireland-specific matters, and it would affiliate to the GAA which would deal with games development worldwide.

“This would free the GAA up to evolve into a true world federation, and what are now called ‘international units’ should be restructured into national federations that also affiliate to the GAA.”

It’s a startling vision that might seem far enough away now, but will seem even further away if the same old attitude is applied to overseas TV rights. Aogán Ó Fearghail has said all the right things ahead of taking office in 2015 but we’ll know much sooner if there’s enough of a willingness to invest in giving the games a global chance.

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