GAA blooms as FAI tulips cut off roots

LockerRoom/Tom Humphries: You are Liam Mulvihill and oft upon your couch you lie. In vacant or in pensive mood. And of course they flash upon that inward eye, that is still the bliss of solitude. That crowd, that host of golden tulips who run the FAI? You are Liam Mulvihill. Do you laugh or do you cry?

After all you run an association which for all its flaws, is the keeper of great living pieces of our culture. To allow you compete you don't get the indulgence of tax breaks like, say, Sadliers Wells and his owner. You don't get to dip into the big golden pot of pay per view. You don't get teachers trained in keeping your games alive. You don't get the marketing benefits of great world stars. You get a Dublin media which largely thinks that the GAA is hick and the Premiership is slick.

You build a stadium for your amateur players and volunteer members, a handsome, sturdy edifice by the canal and when it's half built, the FAI, the Irish arm of the greatest professional sport in the world, announces that it, too, is to build a stadium in which it will stage its half dozen or so home international engagements a year.

Instead the FAI constructs a comic version of Fitzcarraldo, wherein Bernard O'Byrne attempts to haul a great ship over a mountain.

It's a marvel to behold the tension between the rampant egos of the O'Byrne side and the timid realists on the side of solvency. The suspense builds by the week as we wait to see if the FAI will go under before the stadium actually gets built or if the stadium will drag them under, or if Arthur Andersen can be persuaded to do the books and turn the whole thing into a big winner.

And of course in the end with one bound they are free, bought off by a soccer-daft Taoiseach who wants to build a stadium of his own. The FAI walks away with a pocketful of cash and qualify for their first World Cup since 1994.

They walk through the World Cup like wanton fools in a minefield. The whole thing threatens to wipe them off the face of the earth but the team pull through and the force of the good vibes is with them once again.

Most of the matches take place around midday Irish time and in schools all over the country children are herded into halls and big classrooms and they watch in ecstasy, another generation in thrall to soccer. You are Liam Mulvihill and you are a little worried now.

And then, at the point in their history when they least need to, at the one time when everything is going right, when the team are young and good, when the stadium is coming, when the Government money is about to be tapped into, the FAI take Irish soccer off terrestrial television for the sake of an extra €6 million.

Sure, sure, sure, you are Liam Mulvihill and often you have thought that a bit of interest from Sky would sauce up the paltry rights money which RTÉ cough up so grudgingly to the GAA but never in your puff did you imagine that RTÉ's decks would be cleared of Irish soccer and the GAA would become the mainstay of Irish terrestrial sports viewing. You would have paid the €6 million yourself if you thought it could be done.

And the irony is that the FAI has pulled the plug on their fans not just when they least need to but a few milliseconds after the pay-per-view bubble has burst.

It's all gone horribly wrong for soccer and television and while the FAI may have secured a good deal in relation to what RTÉ were offering, in big picture terms the decision to reduce its potential audience to 20 per cent of what it was has been secured on the back of a fairly modest deal.

Take the big picture. When ISL went bust FIFA, in shock, dealt their rights to Kirsch, who in their turn went belly up despite retaining the rights to Formula One and soccer at the time it expired.

The effects were felt right down the market, right the way to Nationwide League level. Broadcasters who had paid too much for rights in the first place were finding advertisers jaded by the product and viewing figures dropping.

The FAI has been bravely telling us that in taking the game away from ordinary people all we have to do is stick €50 a month or so into the pocket of Rupert Murdoch, that great friend of ordinary people everywhere, and everything will be hunky-dory but a large part of the reason that Kirsch went underwater was because Germans point blank refused to pay Leo Kirsch for the right to pay for German soccer.

What happened was what just about everybody predicted would happen. Murdoch, in particular, drove rights prices upwards in order to establish networks. Sports became hooked on the easy money. Competitors became extinct. Now Murdoch complains that sport is "uneconomical", that he believes he overpaid for the Premiership last time around.

The usual suspects will stand on their hind legs and cheer, of course, because post Tiger there is still a lingering feeling that more money is good and less money is bad but Irish soccer sold away something quintessential to its nature last week.

Kids who spent the last month in their replica jerseys imagining that the world held nothing but soccer in it won't be seeing another Irish international match for quite some time.

Those who can't pay or won't pay have been disenfranchised from the game. You are Liam Mulvihill and you look back in bemusement to a time when the GAA used to fear television, when the association, afraid of its own shadow, virtually used to believe that television would kill live attendances and strangle the game.

Yet for the last decade the GAA has embraced television and the sense of event which the medium creates, the excitement which it can transmit. The GAA, which had worked perfectly on a local level, discovered how to transmit its message late in the 20th century and the games have thrived.

You are Liam Mulvihill and you think to yourself that Irish soccer must have learned the same lesson, that Irish soccer must have looked at how sports like rugby league hurt when they all but disappeared from the airwaves, that Irish soccer is on an upswing that can't but hurt you, that Irish soccer, with its new summer league, might start eating into the attention you have been commanding during the summer months.

And then, it all goes quiet save for the howling of those whom Irish soccer has handed over to Rupert Murdoch. Tulips. Golden tulips.

You are Liam Mulvihill. You sit and wait to see how this one will turn right for them.