Take your ticket and enjoy 2020’s budget All-Ireland
THOSE of a certain generation can remember when the cost of an hour-long flight to London totalled over 200 quid. In the 1980s, that meant old Irish punts, or more than €400 in today’s prices.
That was a time when the high cost of air travel was taken as a given, exorbitant though it seemed to a country suffering through a recession.
The perks attached to the flying experience never fully added up. Look, a free newspaper! Or a microwaved breakfast! Or friendly Aer Lingus staff! Or place to stow your book and water bottle in the back of the seat in front of you!
Then Ryanair and its new CEO Michael O’Leary came along in the 1990s and looked at the world and the airline industry in the manner of a snow globe. He decided to shake things up, put a fresh gloss on the meaning ‘no-frills’.
That’s why it became possible to fly to London for the price of an airport sandwich and takeaway coffee.
Right now, the All-Ireland championships resemble the airline industry in that transition period: there’s a realisation that you can travel the same journey to the same destination for a vastly reduced price.
The no-frills winter All-Ireland is now available for booking.
Needs must for the GAA which simply can’t afford to bankroll a Championship which is going to cost an estimated €19.5million without Government subvention. Croke Park face a hit on finances of anything up to €50m in 2020, with a further major hit likely to come in 2021.
THE old business model doesn’t apply — hence the scaling back of the expenses attached to the inter-county game, a sum totalling nearly €30m in 2019.
It’s why a limit is being sought on inter-county teams’ activity — a maximum of three collective sessions to include two training sessions and a game. It’s why Croke Park will pay for the preparation of no more than 32 players in a training panel, and why a maximum of 11 members of the management and backroom teams can travel with the 26-man panels on a match-day.
It’s also why there will be no overnight camps during the 2020 Championship.
Those measures put forward at a remote meeting of Central Council at the weekend represent the GAA attempting to navigate their own flight path to All-Ireland final day on a no-frills basis.
Reducing mileage expenses or player allowances isn’t about doing players out of the appropriate level of player welfare. It’s about cutting costs to make sure this thing can get off the ground at all.
Just like the split season, a clean and simple alternative to provide better balance between club and county activity, the pandemic has exposed the unsustainability of the financial model that has governed the inter-county game. And that is no bad thing. In soccer, Financial Fair Play (FFP) was introduced by UEFA because the economic model for professional football had changed beyond recognition with the arrival of oligarchs, billionaires and various state-sponsored entities buying up streets on the game’s monopoly board.
The level of professionalism embraced at all levels of what is at heart an amateur game has pushed Gaelic football and hurling to new heights in terms of fitness, speed and skill.
The players have embraced their own version of the old Olympic motto ‘faster, higher, stronger’.
But it has served to also highlight how, when counties were being priced out of the All-Ireland race, a version of FFP is needed in the GAA.
The bottom line is that finance is becoming an ever-more important element of preparation in the race for the Sam Maguire and Liam MacCarthy Cups.
It’s why a conversation has been ongoing for years around pooling sponsorship or limiting training nights or finding a way to reduce the costs attached to reaching the summit.
It’s why the Gaelic Players’ Association have popularised the notion of ‘competitive balance’, a idea borrowed from the AFL, one that which seeks to foster greater equality.
And now, by virtue of the financial black hole created by the Covid crisis, the GAA is trying to find a way to apply that ‘competitive balance’ in financial terms.
The nature of the pandemic and its impact on Ireland, and sporting life here, means that the association has had to look at how it does business. What is truly sustainable?
Has the GAA stumbled upon a way to level the financial playing field? Quite possibly.
Just like the split season model, which would see the All-Irelands brought forward to July as players focus on their county before the club gets exclusive access for the second half of the year, legitimate questions have to be asked about the impact on the profile of Gaelic games without the extended season and traditional showpiece in August.
Will inter-county standards suffer if the season is shorter and the amount of time, energy and commitment dedicated to all the training is reduced? Perhaps.
BUT even all of the vested interests have accepted that the current model is unsustainable, in financial terms and every other which way.
Just look at the ESRI report which highlighted the excessive commitment of players to the senior inter-county cause, with some spending at least the 31 hours per week on team activity during peak season.
Do inter-county players really need to be GPS-tagged when they are ‘released’ back to their clubs, like some controlled laboratory experiment?
The level of sports science and training at club level has long moved on to the stage where players are working in another version of an elite environment, just less pressurised, surrounded as they are by friends, family and community.
Just look at the level of performance by so many county stars in a club championship that started in late summer and has run uninterrupted on a week-on-week basis.
Here’s Dean Rock after Ballymun Kickhams’ county semi-final victory over Kilmacud Crokes on Sunday: ‘I’ve had the most enjoyable year I’ve ever had with the club. It’s been hugely refreshing. I suppose it’s rejuvenated myself and the Dublin lads.’
Now it remains to be seen if the same sense of rejuvenation carries over to the winter. When county players and supporters will be asked to take a ticket for a no-frills AllIreland championship. Landing at a venue somewhere near Croke Park.