Flanagan: We are ambitious – we want to win silverware

IAN FLANAGAN says the job of Munster chief executive was the only one for which he’d return to his native land after a career touring the world as a sports executive.

He can’t have envisaged that the first nine months of the job would include one of the province’s Ireland internationals testing positive for a banned substance and the sport being shut down by a global pandemic. But here we are.

So, yesterday he donned his Munster polo and logged on to Microsoft Teams for his first press conference held over video.

In an ideal world, there’d be some chit-chat over a coffee and biscuits before we get stuck into the difficult stuff in person, but Covid has removed such sensibilities.

With each journalist allowed two questions and big issues to get stuck into, the heavy topics come thick and fast. Flanagan is first asked about the financial impact of Covid-19 before we jump straight into the James Cronin case.

By the time the broadcast section has been done with, he’s sidestepped the issue of private money funding the major Springbok signings and said the naming rights for Thomond Park remain up for sale.

With the cameras off he takes on the challenge of social distancing, the global calendar, the worry over Limerick’s declining contribution to the province’s academy, the IRFU/Rugby Players Ireland pay dispute, the €40m Government rescue fund for sport and closing the gap on rivals Leinster.

It’s a pity there was no opportunity to get more of a sense of Flanagan’s industry insights given his career as an executive at Leicester City, but his first media engagement comes after nine action-packed months and there is much to discuss.

Taking over from the late Garrett Fitzgerald, Flanagan is stepping into one of the biggest jobs in Irish sport at the most challenging time. Ultimately, he stated his goal of making Munster less reliant on match-day income by diversifying the province’s revenue streams, and said negotiations with a couple of parties interested in the Thomond rights were ongoing before the pandemic hit but are now on ice. Gate receipts and the commercial income generated on match-day contribute about 50 per cent of the organisation’s income and Flanagan said the ideal model is a 30/30/30 split between match-day, broadcast and commercial revenue.

“Diversifying our revenues is key,” he said. “I would like to ensure that we are not as reliant on match-day

Proposed

Flanagan does not believe that the proposed 20 per cent player pay cuts will have a lasting impact on Munster’s ability to attract new signings.

“Players come to Munster with a clear purpose in mind and I think all the players who have recently arrived share the same objective and ambition as anyone else in our dressing-room,” he said.

“They want to be successful, win trophies and compete at the highest level. That’s the primary motivation. Players can get higher salaries in other parts of the world and that’s never been our selling point.”

Adding Damian de Allende and RG Snyman to the ranks will help and Flanagan believes a full pre-season will reap rewards for rugby’s restart.

“We are ambitious. I don’t think anyone is in any doubt about how ambitious we are, we want to win silverware,” he said.

“We’re very happy with the quality of our coaching team. The focus is always on bringing quality into the academy and the senior squad.”

GETTY New CEO Ian Flanagan believes Munster have shown their intent with the signing of South Africa’s World Cup winners Damian de Allende and RG Snyman income in future. How we regrow the parts of the club and the commercial business of the club is important. “Obviously, we want to reinvest any additional revenues in improving the squad and the facilities for the squad and the stadium and so on. “We want to be the best, we want to be successful. As far as I’m concerned, the more money we can generate, the more we can reinvest in making everything about Munster bigger and better. We have a fantastic match-day team who do an amazing job and I would like to be able to invest more in that part as well “If you look at other sports from around the world, if you look at the Aviva, they have LED systems on a match-day. We don’t at the moment. “Those are concrete investments that we would look to make for Munster as a club just to ensure that we’re competing at the right level and the platform that we offer, or the matchday experience is all at the highest level possible. “Digital is a big focus. That’s an area where we need to invest additional funds and generate additional funds to do so. We have clear areas of improvement and we have a clear project in place to do that as well.” Munster are working to establish the ramifications of the two-metre social distancing rules after it emerged the Aviva Stadium would be reduced to an attendance of 8,400 if the rules were still in place when rugby returns. “What this period has proven is that an over-reliance on match-day revenue in this time where you can’t play games and get people in stadiums is extremely damaging to the revenues,” Flanagan said. “We have to, as best we can, find other ways of generating income and growing the revenue base.”