How to hit the sign of sport promotion

LockerRoom: Just padding down the stairs last Monday morning when an ominous-looking brown envelope slid through the letterbox and floated briefly through the slanted sunlight before landing quietly at the bottom of the stairs.

The envelope bore the emblem of University College, Dublin. This is a sinister thing to see on a Monday morning. Dark possibilities. Perhaps there's no statute of limitations on crimes against academia? Perhaps they want their degree back? Maybe they want money or else they'll send your exam records to your kids?

I went back to bed, just in case.

When finally detonated the envelope was harmless enough. It carried a reminder from the irrepressible Dr Conal Hooper that UCD are holding the country's first sports business conference later this month.

There will be no session or discussion on precisely where Conal Hooper gets his energy from, but the whole thing seems remarkably worthwhile, not least because the opening discussion on "Key Issues on Sports Business" brings together a panel of Philip Browne of the IRFU, Seán Kelly of the GAA and Fran Rooney of the FAI. Just throw in an opening question on stadium feasibility studies and you have primo entertainment right up to lunchtime, I would have thought.

Most of what I know about the business of sport I learned from a great old American book called Hit the Sign and Win a Free Suit of Clothes from Harry Finklestein, by Bert Randolph Sugar. Having covered sport around Ireland for the past decade or so while my community service sentence runs out, I reckon that having read one book on sports business puts me ahead of the curve nationally. In fact I've read two books. The Hustler's Handbook, by Bill Veeck, has also proved invaluable. Next time I hear from UCD I expect it will be in connection with the offer of a professorship in this burgeoning area.

Anyway, it seems to me from my extensive and wide-ranging study of the area that the business of sport in Ireland is widely hampered by the excessive democratisation of sport in Ireland. Every time there is a common-sense decision to be taken about the overall direction of a club or sport, the debate is drowned out by the wails of anguish from some professional keener and the discussion gets sidetracked.

I have a friend who likes to observe that the thing about common sense is that it's not terribly common, and in the case of Irish sport that's especially true. Every decision is limited by the partisan input of interested parties. Two of the three panellists at the opening UCD session, Fran Rooney and Phillip Browne, are billed as chief executives, but they can't move with the freedom which that title would bring if their offices were Stateside or somewhere in the real world. The third, Seán Kelly, is a fine man with ideas of his own who has discovered this year that the GAA has an inexorable will of its own. The association is almost ungovernable.

The curious thing about the big three sports in Ireland is the clunky, cautious way in which they promote themselves. The basis of sport being any sort of a business at all is effective promotion. Everything else is management and policy and the distribution of monies. Yet in Ireland we are hideously backward about things like advertising and logos and the mere provision of novelty.

The most effective promotion which the GAA has had in the past 10 years has been almost by accident. The old dread of live TV coverage was eventually overcome by the need for TV cash, however limited that may be in our small market. Having live games on the box every weekend has breathed life back into the sport.

And then there's the advertising. Guinness, Bank of Ireland and now, most impressively, C&C, have all come through with the sort of advertisements which most sports bodies would love to have produced themselves in order to promote their sports.

And that's the nub of things. In the professional era rugby has managed what sponsors have managed on behalf of the GAA. Rugby has defined a little piece of its essence and marketed it well. Clubs may be dying on their feet, but the marketing of the (Heineken) European Cup as a spectator event has been wonderful. Failure to have sold the event would have been disastrous for the game here. Instead, the sport has hooked into an old view of itself and sold passion. Keith Wood became a symbol of this.

Soccer is most curious of all. The game itself scarcely needs selling. The appetite for Manchester United, et al, is bottomless. Yet the domestic game hardly raises a peek. Clubs bump along weighed down by so much debt that they remain below the plimsoll line. The game has its dedicated followers but can't reach out and grab a bigger market.

The nub of it all seems to be marketing and promotion. From recruitment of kids to getting people through the turnstiles at the weekend, we seem ham-fisted and unsure of what the best tools are. Anyone who has taken an interest in the proceedings of the NBA in the US will have got a glimpse of how a small number of very bright people dedicate themselves to the promotion of the sport. Slogans like Nothing But Net or It's All Good have entered the popular culture through the NBA's relentless promotion of itself. Once it was a struggle to even get the sport itself to register in the popular imagination.

Which brings us back to the significance of Keith Wood. Perhaps because of Irish rugby's near-death experience after professionalism, there seemed to be no begrudgery towards Wood who calmly accepted the iconic role handed to him and performed perfectly on and off the pitch. It was a perfect replication of the successful American model whereby key stars are endlessly promoted and there is enough of an appreciation of the bigger picture for the sport that nobody objects. We haven't got that big picture appreciation yet in Ireland.

We believe most of the time that the games will just sell themselves. For instance, this August and September RTÉ will quietly drop its GAA magazine programme Breaking Ball in what is the busiest period of the year. I have to declare a small interest in Breaking Ball, but whether you like it or love it, the show is one of the few on-air marketing tools for the GAA, one of the few chances the games get to display a different aspect of themselves, to create characters and favourites.

RTÉ has its constraints and its reasons (the Olympics) for shunting the show into the sidelines early this summer. The GAA doesn't seem to mind.

Before there is a business to manage we need a Phineus T Barnum or a Tex Rickard to bring the business in. Rickard, curiously, came from a tradition which began with a Dubliner called Richard Kyle Fox, who left Dublin without a seat in his trousers in 1874 but after two years working on a newspaper in New York had saved $200 which enabled him to borrow some more money which enabled him to buy an ailing magazine known as the National Police Gazette which enabled him to promote everything and everything but mostly (he discovered when he added - a novel idea at the time - a sports section to the gazette) heavyweight boxing.

In Hit the Sign, Fox and Rickard are dealt with in a usefully titled chapter called "It ain't the number of seats you got, it's the number of asses that are in 'em". Fox and Rickard will fill a column on another day.

First, though, Sports Business in Ireland owes sport days of ideas and open exchange like those which will happen in UCD later this month.