Irish Daily Star - Inside Sport
IT’S A MONEY OLD GAME
amateurism is not always the way in the gaa
TWO stories from donegal perfectly illustrate the GAA’s odd relationship with money.
It’s been well documented by now that there was a major fallout between former head of the Academy, Karl Lacey, and the County Board there.
One bone of contention that emerged was a request he put in at the end of last year.
Lacey was a paid employee but the 40 coaches that worked under him were volunteers.
He asked the Board for €1000 to take the coaches for a thankyou meal. Hardly an exorbitant sum when you break it down — working out at €50 per coach — but the request was turned down.
Fast forward a few months and fractious meetings at County Board level that dealt with the Academy controversy as well as the player heave that saw Paddy Carr leave as manager after six League games.
It was pointed out at one meeting that all the controversy and negative publicity had affected Donegal’s capacity for fundraising badly.
Request
But a request from the senior set-up for a training camp at Carton House was also approved at a cost of €35,000.
Donegal were relegated from Division One, having only won their opening game.
Michael Murphy has retired. His replacement as captain, Patrick McBrearty, is injured, and Ryan McHugh — the only man in the squad with an All Star — has decided to go to the US for the summer.
Nobody — inside or outside of the county — expects Donegal to make any kind of significant impact on the Championship.
Indeed, quite a few feel that they’ll lose their Ulster opener to Down next weekend.
So why was such a hefty sum approved for that camp in Carton
House — which took place from
Thursday to Saturday last week?
It’s a head-scratcher, especially when you consider the fact that Donegal opened their own state-of-the-art training centre in Convoy last year.
When fully completed, the Convoy project will have cost €7.8m.
Highlights
This all highlights the weird thinking around money in the GAA. Spend millions on a coaching centre in your own county but then send the senior squad to a training camp in another county. And, at the same time, turn down a Christmas meal for coaches because they’re volunteers.
Something else happened this week that illustrates the money situation in the GAA.
John Costello, Dublin’s longserving CEO, announced that he would be retiring at the end of the year.
On his watch, money came flooding into the capital — from all sorts of avenues. The AIG sponsorship, for example, was worth €800,000 a year.
In 2018, the Spawell site was bought for €9m. A huge site was bought at Hollystown too, where a €6.6m centre of excellence will be built.
Whoever succeeds Costello will be taking on a role that is as big as all but a handful in Irish sport.
And it’s likely the salary package on offer to the new CEO will reflect that.
The GAA increasingly operates with a sometimes uneasy relationship between full-time paid staff and an army of volunteers.
Every county does things their own way, for good measure. When the Donegal Academy was launched, a partnership was set up with 14 schools where voluntary S&C coaches would visit each of them once a week. It will be a year next month since Wexford launched a similar scheme, but they committed €385,000 over five years towards it.
The GAA’s amateurism has always been a strange beast.
Eight years ago, the then-Dublin manager Jim Gavin proclaimed that he would walk away from the GAA if pay-for-play ever came into being.
But, just a few weeks earlier, Toyota came on board as one of Dublin’s sponsors.
As part of the deal, new Auris and Avensis cars were supplied to many of the players.
If you went into a showroom in 2014 when that deal was announced, you’d have seen that the price of those motors started at €19,725.
If a player was handed a cheque for nearly 20 grand, there would be uproar and talk of a breach of the amateur code.
But, when you get a car of that value for nothing, aren’t you effectively being paid in kind?
Principle
Many would be surprised to learn that the GAA’s amateurism isn’t even rooted in any historical principle.
Instead, the decision was taken in the early days to steer away from professionalism simply because the money wasn’t there.
Indeed, in the first decade of the GAA’s existence, there were cash prizes that were later replaced by books of Irish interest.
After a time, gold medals came on board but this led to heated arguments about the expense and quality of the gold being
used.
In Michael Moynihan’s book ‘GAAconomics’, John Trainor of Onside Sponsorship explains graphically why the GAA is so attractive to commercial clients.
“If I were talking to a colleague in England, what I’d be telling him is that in Ireland, there are 670,000 Manchester United fans, 535,000 Dublin fans, 456,000 Liverpool fans, 422,000 Cork fans, 339,000 Kilkenny fans etc,’’ he said.
Command
“The point is that in the Irish market, the Dublin footballers and hurlers and the Cork hurlers and footballers command bigger support bases, or bases as big, as any Premier League team outside Liverpool and Manchester United.
“There are significantly more Cork and Dublin fans than there are for Chelsea or Arsenal, for instance, which shows the scale and size of the fan bases which support their counties.”
But not every county is a Dublin or a Cork.
Many are lucky to get €50,000 a year in sponsorship, let alone €800,000. And it’s worth remembering that AIG are only one of Dublin’s many sponsors.
Quite a few counties have got into serious financial trouble over the last five years and it’s increasingly difficult for volunteers to run county boards with seven-figure turnovers. Eventually, something will have
to give.
‘Quite a few counties have got into serious financial trouble in five years’