League of Ireland clubs should strike while the iron is hot
DUNDEE who this season finished bottom of the Scottish Premiership will receive €1,016,386 in prize money.
Bray Wanderers, relegated from the SSE Airtricity Premier League last season for finishing bottom received €17,000 in prize money.
Celtic who were crowned champions of the Scottish premiership last week will receive €4,033,202 in prise money.
Dundalk, who were crowned champions of the SSE Airtricity Premier League last November, received €110,000. How do you account for this?
Well the table published here graphically illustrated the differential in prize money between the Scottish and Irish Premier Leagues.
In total the Scottish FA will hand out €22m. in prize money to the 12 teams who completed in the Premiership this season.
The total prize money handed out by the FAI to the 12 clubs who competed in the League of Ireland (LOI) last season was €350,000, the exact same figure that is again on offer this season.
The reason why the Scottish League is so lucrative for competing clubs, as compared with the LOI, is simply down to one fact, the TV deal negotiated with the Scottish FA and the TV companies.
The existing deal, which operates until the end of the 2019-20 season is worth €21m. a season and is operated jointly by Sky and BT who share the coverage.
Following the conclusion of that deal, a new contract, exclusively with SKY, and reported to be worth €30m a year for the next five years, will kick into place.
It is, according to the President of the Scottish FA, the ‘biggest investment in the Premiership since in came into existence 20 years ago’.
‘You can’t compare Scottish football with the LOI in terms of audience appeal’, will be the argument advanced by those who maintain that the TV companies will never pay the same money, or anything like it, to screen LOI games.
But is that exactly true?
The average attendance at Scottish Premier League in 2017-18 season was 15,690.
But that figure is grossly distorted by the presence of Celtic (whose average ‘gate’ is 57,000) and Rangers (average 48,000), and no doubt the TV companies are paying premium rates to screen Scottish football because of the appeal of Celtic and Rangers, especially their four derby matches each season.
But the average attendance of the lesser clubs in the Scottish League would only match those of the top teams in the LOI.
For example, the latest figures available for the 2017-18 season, reveal the average attendance for Hamilton Academicals was 3,075, for Livingston it was 4,051, for St. Johnstone for whom David McMillan signed from Dundalk the average attendance was 4,085, for St. Mirren, 5,300 and for Motherwell, regarded as one of the top clubs, the average was 5,724.
No comparable figures are available for the LOI for the simple fact that not all clubs make returns, but a figure has emerged for the first 32 games of the current campaign which revealed an average ‘gate’ of 2,686.
Overall attendances for the LOI this season are up by 11.3% with the highest attendance recorded of 4,693 at the Shamrock Rovers-Dundalk match in Tallaght.
Dundalk, on a few occasions this season, have topped the 4,000 mark, and Bohemians have been drawing their biggest crowds for years as illustrated by Dundalk’s visit to Dalymount last Friday week when there was a better atmosphere than at many of the Scottish games seen on TV.
All of these figures are worthy of consideration considering the crux in which the FAI now finds itself, and the new opportunities that should arise if, and when, a new executive takes over the Association.
The deal that the Scottish FA negotiated with SKY includes coverage of all Scotland’s games in the World and European Cup, and while the FAI have a television deal for coverage of international games, including friendlies, the deal that they have with RTE and BT for coverage of League of Ireland games has never bee revealed to the clubs.
They have been told that the deal is ‘commercially sensitive’, and the reality is that the token fee the clubs received for allowing cameras into their games doesn’t sometimes cover the loss in ‘gate’ receipts from those who stay at home or in the pub to watch on TV.
Clearly TV money is the only realistic avenue by which LOI clubs can get the investment into the game to improve the standard of player, surfaces and facilities, and in the window that now exists because of the problems within the FAI, the clubs should be making their case.
Obviously their game has not the same appeal as the Scottish game because of the absence of Celtic and Rangers, and because all Scottish clubs have excellent grounds, courtesy of the taxpayer, which form a much better backdrop for the TV audiences.
For that reason the LOI could not command anything like the €30m. Sky are paying every season in Scotland, but a third, even less, would do a great deal for Irish clubs and allow them invest in their grounds, and make them more appealing for TV.
There is an added marketing advantage in that the League of Ireland is played throughout the summer when TV schedules are light on football coverage, and all of these factors should become a priority in the coming months when the FAI gets the opportunity to take a good hard look at the vital role that the League of Ireland should be playing in the domestic game.