For Cork and Ashley it’s not personal, it’s strictly business
It’s an offer the Rebels couldn’t afford to refuse
IT’S tempting to imagine Mike Ashley already i ndulging his i nner Rebel. You can picture him pinning a poster of a shaven-headed Jimmy Barry-Murphy to his office wall, to replace the fading portrait of Alan Shearer. He may have thumbed through Val Dorgan’s definitive portrait of Christy Ring over the Christmas.
Old episodes of Today FM’s Gift Grub and Radio Roy might prompt him to let out an English cackle as he wraps his mouth around mimicking ‘ya langer’ in conversation and kicks back, feet up on the mahogany desk, not just a billionaire businessman who owns Newcastle United Football Club and runs a sprawling retail empire that flows from his founding of Sports Direct, but now someone who is attached to Cork GAA.
When Cork agreed a deal worth an estimated €2million over five years, they probably didn’t fully anticipate a debate on zero hours contracts, questions in parliament or the ethical complexities of sponsorship arrangements.
Because this is the same Mike Ashley that is an infrequent figure on Match of the Day, usually captured in a camera zoom before a cutaway to fan protests over his running of Newcastle United or the inevitable ‘Ashley Out’ banner. The same Mike Ashley whose company and Derbyshire warehouse was the subject of a Guardian undercover investigation into work practices, a warehouse known by some locally, according to the same piece, as ‘the gulag’. The same man appeared before a House of Commons Select Committee i n December 2018 to answer questions on a similar theme and showed a more combative streak and knowledge of his brief than a fair share of the players who have lined out at St James’ Park over the years, declaring to the various Members of Parliament that he is ‘ not Father Christmas’.
Judging by the various reactions online to news of his link-up with Cork GAA, that much is not in doubt, Many Cork supporters declared that they won’t buy the new county jersey that will be branded with Sports Direct or any other associated merchandise.
Mike Ashley and Cork GAA – turns out 2021 could be even stranger than 2020.
But the county board might just as well parrot that old line from The Godfather: ‘it’s not personal, it’s strictly business’.
And in pure business terms, in a pandemic, with such uncertainty over the shape of the season — if there is to be one — it looks a good piece of business. That’s judging purely by the bottom line. The only line Ashley too — or the Irish arm of his business — will be looking at.
It is understood that the fiveyear deal will run up to 2025 and is estimated at €2million with Sports Direct to replace Chill Insurance as the county board’s primary inter-county sponsor.
The base figure of €400,000 a year doesn’t include additional six-figure performance related bonuses, if Cork can wed their new sponsor to All-Ireland success in football or hurling.
The retailer already has a business footprint in the city: apart from the existing Blackpool outlet, plans are in place to take over the landmark Eason store on Patrick Street in the city. So it’s a sponsorship arrangement that makes for an obvious fit, on many levels.
The redevelopment of Páirc Uí Chaoimh can be seen as either a shining testament to Cork’s ambition and vision for the future or a financial millstone around the neck of the board — or perhaps even both. But the stark bottom line can’t be ignored with the county convention showing an overall debt of €21.65million.
It’s why Cork progressively rebranded its executive and commercial strategy under the ‘One Cork’ model during Tracey Kennedy’s time as chair up until December’ s convention; reorganised radically with Kevin O’Donovan as CEO replacing Frank Murphy.
The new deal suggests Cork can’t afford to take the high moral ground.
With i nter- county activity turned into a financial arms race, it was always going to attract individuals like Ashley.
The past decade, in particular, has seen inter-county costs soar. Tom Ryan, the GAA’s current director general, f amously described it as a ‘monster’ in his former guise as finance director. By 2017 it broke the €25 million mark for the first time. For 2019, it amounted to €29.74 million.
In terms of sponsorship, this is Cork’s attempt in trying to keep pace with Dublin, whose deal with AIG is valued at double the Sports Direct tie-up.
Tipperary’s desire to be a force in hurling under Liam Sheedy saw a whole commercial board established. It featured Niall Quinn and Alan Quinlan and was chaired by Declan Kelly, the chairman and CEO of county sponsors Teneo.
Rising costs encouraged Mayo to court their own version of Ashley in financial high-flyer Tim O’Leary. That all went pearshaped in awful public fashion, showing up the culture clash between big business and volunteer officials trying to run what is now, effectively, a big business.
In a sense, the weekend just past was all about footwear.
News also filtered out of Donie Vaughan’s retirement at the age of 32, the Mayo footballer calling time after a 12-year career that yielded a National League title, a clutch of Connacht titles and saw him start five All-Ireland finals. Indeed, he was one of the touchstones for a county’s relentless, obsessive quest to get over the line – even if that quest would ultimately be in vain.
It’s not the first time Vaughan and Sports Direct made headlines together. The player’s nickname ‘Shoes’ stems from his own i n- s t ore and onli ne r e t ai l business.
Cork GAA aren’t breaking new ground with this controversial Ashley tie-in. They are only going where the GAA and Gaelic Players Association have gone before with an online boot deal that turned into a public relations disaster in 2013 when it turned out that gaelicboots.com was a Trojan horse for Sports Direct. In March of that year, it was Vaughan
“Cork can’t
ignore the bottom line”
“Taking high
moral ground is not an option”
who queried whether the deal had any genuine benefit to players and highlighted the difficulty it posed to his business.
‘I was looking at their (Adidas) World Cup boots, for example, and they’re selling at €80,’ he said at the time. ‘I’d hardly be able to buy it for that!
‘It hasn’t affected me yet but I would be conscious of the price they’re selling stuff at.’
The world has moved on since. Ashley and Sports Direct have dipped their toes in Irish waters and one of the strangest subplots to the latest story is how the FAI have been repaying the company €100,000 per month because of a terminated sponsorship deal, a legacy issue from the John Delaney era.
And now the flagship company of the billionaire businessman is going to be knitted into the cultural and historical legacy of Cork GAA. Welcome to 2021. It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.