Ian Mallon: Sky turns its eyes and resources towards women's football
BOXING CLEVER: Ireland WNT manager Vera Pauw at Sky Ireland Headquarters in Dublin. Picture: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
Amid all of the analysis and speculation of the past two days, the one thing missing from the story of Sky’s withdrawal from the GAA's media rights stable was the ‘Why now?’, as Croke Park prepared its rights deals announcement for the next four years.
While described as a “mutual agreement” by the broadcaster in its goodbye message to Croke Park - received 24 hours before Tuesday's rewritten ‘GAA Broadcast Statement 2023-2027’ - the breakup came despite a lengthy negotiation process, going back to last year.
In all probability, Sky has had enough of the GAA, it gets relatively nothing from it audience-wise, and it sees its sporting strategy dependent on the rising commercial stock of the Republic of Ireland's women’s national soccer team.
The Irish Examiner understands the broadcaster was part of the recent bidding process with the FAI during the final round of negotiations for exclusive coverage of Uefa Euro 2025 qualifying matches.
Currently RTÉ owns rights to the women’s international football, but Sky sources say the broadcaster is confident of landing a deal following a highly strategic 13-month period, which began with the takeover over of the side’s lead sponsorship.
The Sky Ireland bid may be part of a wider attempt by its UK parent company to land women’s rights for the England Lionesses, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland teams.
Insiders say Sky “has put all of its eggs into trying to get women’s international football and has gone in big” with Uefa in Nyon, Switzerland.
It will have to wait a while for that announcement by Uefa, which may coincide with the unveiling of a host nation for Euro 2025, sometime in December, or perhaps into next year.
What a deal with the WNT will give Sky Ireland is exclusivity on one of the hottest tickets in Irish team sport, and a much-improved lift than it appreciated with GAA, where low figures and paltry audience numbers on shared matches with RTÉ barely registered.
Sky guards its viewership data but it’s believed that an average audience of 20k tuned into the station for this year’s All Ireland finals - which achieved 862k for the football final, and 774k for the hurling decider on RTÉ.
While those significantly higher audience numbers for RTÉ were below average compared to other years - when finals were held in late August and September, as opposed to July - it still represents numbers up to 40 times greater Sky’s audience.
The broadcaster knows it must achieve a win with its sporting assets here, and diversify into other markets, not just depend on the highly lucrative Premier League and golf marketplaces, which are the benchmark of its sporting sales staple.
GAA Congress’s commercially reductive decision to condense its championship season into four months was also a key factor for Sky to bring to an end a nine-year relationship which consisted of an eight-year contract, with an additional one-year extension.
Sky CEO JD Buckley’s statement on Monday pointed to the untenability of the current calendar when he said that “the new shortened GAA season and its knock-on impact on the number of games Sky Sports wanted to broadcast” was a key driver in its exit strategy.
What all of this means for the GAA is an immediate impact of up to €1.5m in rights deals lost from Sky for next year (with indications suggesting that price could be as high as €2m).
It has also resulted in Croke Park rushing out of its GAAGO delivery of games which was announced with little detail yesterday, as part of its 2023-27 rights announcement, which also sees Sky’s shared All Ireland semi-finals and finals coverage going to BBC.
What the GAAGO rush will bring is a first time streaming service of exclusive championship games which would have been shown on Sky, and will bring fresh commercial opportunity to the GAA.
One broadcaster which was not tempted to enter the fray to take up the vacant Sky package was Virgin Media, whose sports rights strategy for the foreseeable future is bundled around providing significant soccer coverage of international matches.
Virgin has the rights to all men's international Uefa Euro 2024 qualifiers (Men) – except Republic of Ireland games – on top of its Nations League coverage and will concentrate its interests in that sector for the immediate term.
Should Sky be successful in landing Women’s soccer rights for after next year’s World Cup, it can expect to pay similar budget to what it paid for its GAA coverage, with a far greater viewership.
It should not go unnoticed that the women’s soccer team has attracted greater audience numbers than the men’s side for all international games this year, with the one exception being Stephen Kenny’s side’s Saturday night, primetime defeat to Scotland last month.
While Sky cannot expect to reach the almost 382k ‘Average Audience’ which tuned into RTÉ to watch the Women’s World Cup playoff, also with Scotland, it will certainly secure a significantly greater share than it experienced with its GAA coverage for almost a decade.
