Gaelic football is the real problem in half-told story of fans and finance
FAKE news enjoyed a big week in the GAA, portraying it as having haemorrhaged so much public interest and money in a year that if the trend continues, the Association will be lucky to reach its 135th birthday in November, let alone its 150th in 2034.
“Gate receipts down 14pc and attendances down 18pc’ were the headline items from the 2018 accounts, published on Wednesday.
The figures came from GAA finance director Ger Mulryan, so no fake news there.
Announced at 10am, the decline was still deemed sufficiently newsworthy to make the nine o’clock news on RTÉ that night alongside Brexit and the nurses’ strike.
Fair enough, the GAA has a wide reach so it’s news when it suffers such a substantial drop in crowds and revenue. Except, of course, it wasn’t true, not in its totality anyway.
Yes, one part of the GAA took a hit but others didn’t. In fact, two elements grew at a rate never previously experienced.
Crowds (248,829) at last year’s Munster hurling increased by 94pc on 2017 and by 147pc on 2016. Leinster hurling (even excluding the replayed Galway v Kilkenny final) increased by 25pc on 2017 and by 129pc on 2016.
Gate receipts for those two provincial championships rose by €2.2m on 2017.
The report issued last Wednesday showed that football championship attendances dropped by 23pc, per cent, with hurling decreasing by 4pc.
How can that be? If Munster and Leinster hurling increased so substantially, why are the overall figures down? The answer rests in how the GAA is administered. The championship figures released this week relate only to the All-Ireland series.
The four provincial councils run their own championships and financial affairs. So when you read or hear that the GAA dropped 14pc revenue and 18pc attendance last year, a large part of the story is missing because the provincial championships are not included.
There’s no sleight of hand involved – it’s just how the GAA has always run its affairs. County boards and provincial councils are autonomous, as is Central Council whose main source of income is receipts from All-Ireland championship games.
Provincial
So let’s examine the impact when the provincial figures are added to the All-Ireland returns. In that case, football attendances dropped by 21pc last year while hurling rose by 19pc.
When the two are put together, it shows a drop of 6.7pc on 2017. Yet because the Central Council figures are published in isolation, as they were on Wednesday, the 18pc overall decrease is the headline, although not the full story.
Other that a reference to the ‘flip side of the attendance decrease being that our sister councils in Leinster and Munster enjoyed significant attendance growth in hurling’, the Central Council’s report makes no reference to the overall figures.
They will argue that it’s not their remit, but are they content to see the GAA making all the news bulletins for having a bad year when it’s far from the full truth? For some inexplicable reason, it would appear so.
The big story from the 2018 figures is the contrast between the two codes. Football bombed, whereas hurling flourished under the new format.
Ulster football attendances shrunk by a whopping 25pc while Leinster contracted by 28pc. The loss of Tyrone at the quarter-final stage and Monaghan in the semi-final has a negative impact in Ulster, but the question also arises as to the impact of increased admission prices.
Ulster CEO Brian McAvoy conceded that dearer admission played a role in the decline. Indeed, it’s safe to assume that the law of diminishing returns applied and that they would have had a higher return if they stuck with existing prices.
Leinster football has a major problem because of Dublin’s dominance. Even then, more than 66, 000 attended the 2017 Leinster final (Dublin v Kildare), but it was down to 41, 728 last year for Dublin v Laois.
That’s not surprising since Laois don’t have as big a support as Kildare and few expected them to come close to Dublin.
Dublin’s dominance has cast a shadow across the entire football landscape, just as Kerry did when they were all-conquering under Mick O’Dwyer.
So much so that the average attendance in their three All-Ireland semi-finals in 1980-8182 was 26,000 (only 17,512 were there for the clash with Armagh in 1982).
Dublin’s excellence is to be applauded, but the reality is that it has deflated the rest of the market. Perhaps even more relevant is the ever-decreasing entertainment offered by the modern game.
The public are prepared to pay for good entertainment, but not for the sterile stuff they are now being served up in so many football games.
Facts don’t lie so if anyone still doubts that people are fed up with how football is played nowadays all they have to do is look at the hurling figures.
Crowds have never been higher because the product is so good. Not so with football, yet when an attempt was made to experiment with limiting the handpass to see if would spark an improvement, Central Council shot it down after watching it for a few weeks in pre-season games.
Their failure to allow it run a proper trial in the 116-game league was a dereliction of duty, the negative impact of which will be apparent throughout the year.