Ian Mallon: The making of an €18m darts hootenanny
CHRISTMAS STAPLE: Michael Van Gerwen is one of the favourites for this year's PDC World Dart Championships. Pic: PA
From Thursday until the early New Year, 90,000 fans will converge on the most compelling and barmiest tournament on the sporting calendar – the PDC World Darts Championship.
Fans will spend €4m on tickets and an additional €3m (about £30 per head) on refreshments, some will come dressed as Super Mario or Fred Flintstone, and others will wave messages at the cameras: “I only went out to get bread” is a favourite.
At the end of each set they will join in a singalong of a Planet Funk trance classic with more than 3,100 fans joining a chorus of ‘Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi’, while hundreds of thousands more at home will hum along to the sporting soundtrack of Christmas.
Throughout key markets of the UK, Ireland, Holland, Austria and Germany and a growing US audience, and as far afield as Australia and New Zealand, the seasonal drama is a highly compelling occasion.
For the PDC it’s a mushrooming business, as its increasing value is a must-have for sports networks, which now includes DAZN, Sky Sports, Viaplay and Fox Sports amongst others who want to broadcast a tournament which will this year turn over approximately £15m.
The bulk of that money will come through the rights deals with those broadcasters, now worth an estimated £6-8m to the PDC, for a staggering 16 days of competition.
That breaks down into 28 different sessions of up to three hours long, of head-to-head match-ups between the world’s top players – carried twice daily – including a Primetime show each evening.
For the 21 commercial partners who spend an estimated total of €5m to be part of the extravaganza the event offers extraordinary visibility, and where BoyleSports and Ballygowan line up as associates alongside Cazoo, the cream brand in sports sponsorship.
So how did an event which was once held in a grotty Essex nightclub grow to become one of the most valuable fixtures on the calendar, going out at a time when more people are at home and more engaged than at any time during the rest of the year?
CEO of the PDC Matthew Porter told The Pitch that its success “wasn’t rocket science”, and that the fun aspect happened by accident, “when someone happened to show up in fancy dress one night”.
“It was just organic, the tickets sold out so we put more sessions on,” Porter explains.
“We brought more players into the event, we got more broadcast contracts so we could put more prize money into it, and sponsors approached us about being involved in it.
“It wasn’t any sort of rocket science or anything like that, it was just a good event and it was at the right time of year as well when people are really craving some sort of alternative entertainment to Christmas TV.
“It’s become a fixture on screens around the Christmas period, and that’s really important.”
Porter outlines that Wimbledon wouldn’t work in February, or the FA Cup in November and so too, the PDC World Championship at any other time than Christmas wouldn’t make commercial, or any other type of sporting sense.
“Some things just go together, the World Darts Championship and Christmas go together and the Ally Pally is now synonymous with it because of what’s happened over the last 15 years.”
What happened 15 years ago was that the PDC moved the event from the Circus Tavern to the Alexandra Palace in North London, providing access to more fans and a platform for a big atmosphere and spectacular production.
The tournament – which runs until January 3 (with four days off in between) – will be the most consistently watched sport throughout the festive period due to the sheer volume of matches, programmes and highlights shows.
While Porter might downplay the success, he and his bosses at Matchroom Sport, Barry and Eddie Hearn, knew from the days when the game was solely run by the British Darts Organisation (BDO) that it had enormous commercial potential.
It also happened that Barry Hearn’s PDC concept – which was born out of a messy four-year wrangle with the BDO at the turn of the century – coincided with the rise of Sky Sports.
The combination of both, says Porter, was a “happy coincidence that the two were formed around the same time and end-up growing up together”.
Sky Sports declined to take part in a business examination of its involvement with the World Darts Championship, but the value to the organisation will be worth upwards from £10m in advertising and subscription fees across the 28 sessions, less broadcast costs.
The prize money is growing substantially, too.
In the first round, the world’s top 32 seeds will play 32 qualifiers, all competing for a £2.5m purse – Winner £500k, Runner-up £200k, Semi-Finalist £100k, Quarter Finalists £50k, Fourth Round Losers £35k, Third Round Losers £25k, Second Round Losers £15k, First Round Losers £7,500.
Darts is one of those rare sports – horseracing and snooker included – which allows women to compete with men, and this year three female players will take part.
That is reflected in the audience where 30 per cent of all viewers are women, and growing each year, making the PDC World Championship one of the most diversely appealing events in sport with a growing value year-on-year.
Chelsea's £20m sleeve deal falls victim to crypto crash
It's been a torrid year for the Chelsea FC commercial team, following the walkout by ‘3’ after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year.
While the Irish-run telecoms firm is back as lead sponsor at the club, the Blues find themselves without its first ever digital asset partner following the collapse of an arrangement with Asian crypto firm the Amber Group.
The £20m per year deal is off after the trading and lending platform walked away from an agreement to feature its WhaleFin logo on the sleeves of the Chelsea shirt, just seven months after it was announced in the immediate aftermath of Todd Boehly’s takeover.
While football fans will have been aware of crypto.com and its sponsorship of the Qatar World Cup in recent weeks, the future of the sector is becoming increasingly precarious.
According to Bloomberg, Amber will axe 40% of jobs at the firm in the wake of the ongoing and seemingly terminal collapse of the FTX exchange, amid a $2 trillion dollar rout.
The news service quoted a top executive at the group, quoted from Twitter, that the firm is still conducting “business as usual”. Chelsea might disagree.
There are 450k volunteers across the sporting landscape providing an economic benefit of €1.5B according to the Federation of Irish Sport.
In a bid to recognise these extraordinarily dedicated coaches, ground staff and helpers, the Federation has launched its 2022 Volunteers in Sports Awards, for those who manage the running of sport “in every county across the country”.
Nominations are now open at www.volunteersinsport.ie until January 25, with the results announced in March.
Awards will be determined on a county-by-county basis with the 32 winners selected from across the island, with one overall winner for the Outstanding Volunteer Award.
FIS CEO Mary O’Connor said that the awards are a way of “shining a light on our volunteers in sport is a way to recognise and remind people of the invaluable role they play in society”.
