€75,000: The cost of All-Ireland success for Dublin ladies
‘We’ve never gone after equality, we’ve gone after fairness’ – Dublin boss Bohan
AT the banquet on the night of the 2017 All-Ireland ladies SFC final, Mick Bohan was approached by a former referee he knew proffering congratulations. “I know how ye won it,” he informed the Dublin manager with a wink.
He then raised his hand, rubbing his index finger and thumb together, the universal sign for money, cash, lucre. Bohan was taken aback. “When we came in,” he says now, “the players were going home after training, having beans on toast.”
Last year, the bill for running the Dublin ladies team came in at around €75,000.
In Bohan’s four years as manager – each of which has concluded with All-Ireland success – the most they have run up is €103,000.
By way of relevant comparison, the cost of preparing the Cork senior ladies football team in 2019 was €111,000, roughly similar.
But here comes the inevitable contrast.
In 2017, Kevin McStay revealed it had cost €15,000 a week to run the Roscommon senior men’s footballers.
Conservatively, over the course of an eight-month season, that adds up to around half a million euro.
Last year, Limerick county board treasurer Liam Bourke revealed in his report to Annual Convention that the bill for the county hurling team’s 2019 All-Ireland winning holiday came to approximately €560,000.
That same year, the Mayo senior football team ran up €696,890 in expensed mileage alone.
Perfectly
On this, Bohan is eager to make one thing perfectly clear: neither he nor his players are looking for equality. They’re looking for fairness.
There’s a difference.
“We’ve never gone after equality – ever. Because we don’t think we should just be given that. We’ve gone after fairness.
“Is it fair that they had to come to training and they don’t get fed? No, it’s not.
“But we’re not putting 80,000 people in Croke Park. We have never, ever gone around with the ‘poor me’ attitude. We took it on ourselves to go out and earn it.”
Some context.
Due to restrictions on teams travelling by bus, last year was the first time ladies players were in receipt of any mileage allowance, one of the costliest items on any men’s county board’s annual expense sheet – most notably in the case of Mayo.
Secondly, Bohan has minimised coaching outlay. In 2019, the Tipperary hurling strength and conditioning coach, Cairbre Ó Cairealláin, relocated from Belfast to Thurles so he could be on-call for the year.
Clearly, that’s not the sort of expense any ladies team could justify.
“You could not put a price on the quality of people I have involved with me,” he insists. “But they’re all in there in a voluntary capacity.”
Some of the expenditure of running the Dublin ladies team is met by an annual payment from the county board out of their overall sponsorship with AIG, but more of it is raised by Bohan and his team.
Anne Heraty, through her company, CPL Resources, came on board. As did KPMG, employers of team captain Sinéad Aherne. The Mater Private assisted with some of the squad’s medical needs.
Last year, Dublin’s nutrition and meal costs totalled between €40,000 and €50,000. It’s a marked upgrade from beans on toast but it still doesn’t meet all their needs.
On a normal week, the squad meet four times. To keep costs tight, they go without a post-workout meal after a 40-minute gym session on Mondays, but are fed after pitch sessions on Tuesday and Thursday and their weekend match.
“The things you just have to pay for are your S&C (strength and conditioning), your physio, your facilities,” explains Bohan.
Prior to 2020, the biggest single item on their annual bill was a training/bonding weekend in places like Lahinch and Dungarvan.
Their itinerary was for three days, featuring three coaching sessions, an internal match, two day-time activities like surfing or cycling, and one social evening.
For 52 people, the whole thing cost €10,000. Staged at a facility such as those used by some men’s teams, the bill for the same weekend could easily come to three times that amount.
Trimmings
On the general point of spiralling inter-county team costs, Bohan is adamant “there has to be trimmings that can be made without squads suffering.”
But ideally, he reckons, somewhere between €150,000 and €180,000 would be enough to comfortably run a top-level ladies team in order “to meet demands and maintain success”.
The extra money, he explains, would be spent on a second physio to meet the demands posed by a 36-player group at a cost of between €15,000 to €20,000 a year.
Players wouldn’t be out of pocket for physical therapists, physios and masseurs, as they regularly are at the moment. And feeding the players after their Monday gym workout would take an extra €12,000 for the season.
Anything left over would go into the team’s online stats set-up, most of which is clipped and fed back by management at a great drain on their time.
“But whatever about money, about resources, it’s about fairness of opportunity too,” Bohan stresses. “Do most girls teams have an S&C coach?
“Do they have access to the better coaches? Do they have access to the best pitches. No, they don’t. Are they getting the start at six, seven or eight that the Diarmuid Connollys or Bernard Brogans got? They’re not. Not at the moment. And that’s something that just has to change.”