If the GAA were to do a proper job on marketing the championship it would scrap its biggest weakness, the provincial system

RECENT WEEKS have reminded us of the seasonal reality that the National Leagues, like their busiest month, March, come in like a lion and depart like a lamb. The championship gets it the right way around but each season there is unease at how gently the lamb meanders about its business.

Every year the GAA, its public, broadcasters and other media all, to varying degrees, regret that the championship starts lower key than a church collection in Florida.

This unhappiness is frequently deepened by the activities of other sports. The early weeks of championship often jostle uneasily for attention with World Cups, European Championships, Champions’ Leagues and as at present in rugby, the European Cup.

One tendency is to bristle at what by implication are the undeserved levels of public interest such competitions attract.

Hype gets blamed for a lot of the trouble – as if in the above cases it is some mysterious or mischievous activation that unfairly elevates the GAA’s competitor-attractions.

Some of the ersatz enthusiasms generated in the broader media for English Premier League soccer or the recent stream of Irish rugby successes can be irritating but tedious excess in those sports is no easier to lampoon than it is in Gaelic games.

Celebrity day-tripping isn’t confined to any particular sports events.

The international aspect of rugby and soccer creates effective selling points for those sports in a way that the GAA has no opportunity to exploit. On the other hand, Gaelic games can produce big events all the time with no need to compete on the global stage – something which has in the past been unfairly used to compare unfavourably football and hurling with other disciplines.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. In 1988 the Republic of Ireland first reached the final stages of a major soccer tournament. The GAA survived that and the summer of Italia 90 and kept going, revamping both Croke Park and the championship formats as it progressed through the decade.

The gloomy refrain that “one more World Cup will finish us off” has come and gone and the GAA remains very much in business.

Maybe Irish rugby will continue to be as successful as it currently is. Perhaps 2009 will become the bench mark. But precedent teaches otherwise, as even GAA counties, such as Meath and Armagh can testify.

Ironically, hand in hand with decrying the hype involved in the promotion of other sports often goes a recriminatory attitude to Croke Park’s failure to “market properly” things like the Railway Cup, the National Leagues – and by extension less than heartstopping first-round championship fixtures – as happens with the International Rules series.

Marketing however is about devising the best possible circumstances for matches and occasions. For the International Rules series, Croke Park calls the shots for the home Tests: when and where they are played, at what time and (with the AFL’s input) under what rules.

Never mind the interprovincials and leagues. Think about the championships and what the GAA have to market: a system that would never have been devised, were people sitting down now to plan an optimum competitive structure.

The European Cup in rugby was only founded 14 seasons ago but it works, from an Irish viewpoint, simply because this country’s ancient provincial delineations proved the ideal size geographically and demographically for a competing team. The competition attracts interest and generates revenue (although in its one aspect that is unhelpful to the IRFU, the deal with Sky ensures that the Irish successes of recent years have been reserved to those with satellite subscriptions).

If the GAA was to do a proper job – in other words to be given its head – on marketing the championship it would tear up its biggest weakness, which in ironic counterpoint to rugby is the provincial system.

It creates grossly unequal paths to the same destination, the All-Ireland, and perennially draws together the same old pairings whether people like it or not. It makes the opening fixtures the creatures of caprice and generally very hard to market, compared to the first round of the national leagues when opening matches can be set up for promotional value.

When the Football Competitions Review Task Force, appointed by Seán Kelly during his presidency, sat down to consider the way forward for the football championship the most popular suggestion was what’s known as the champions’ league format, essentially a series of small round-robin groups leading to knock-out rounds running in one straight season from spring to the end of the summer and combining the league and championship.

But this was accompanied by the realisation that such a departure had no chance of gaining acceptance because of the dominant role of the provincial councils, who are seen as reluctant to sign the death warrant of their chief means of financial support and throw themselves at the mercy of centrally disbursed funding.

Unfortunately that’s the way the organisation operates, from top down. It wants things to get better but is always afraid that proposed change, no matter how rigorously planned, will instead be for the worse – as the recent Congress debate on discipline demonstrated.

So for the foreseeable future the GAA operates on the basis not of marketing as professionals would understand it but in the more limited sense of making the best of a bad lot. Marketing after all can’t turn gooseberries into platinum.

The unpublished report of the Marketing Sub-committee in 2005 outlined areas in which the GAA could improve on its handling of the games. It included the strategic use of Croke Park and emphasised the selection of all venues as critical to marketing.

A central element was ticketing and both Croke Park and the provincial councils have developed this aspect with Munster and Leinster this week announcing expanded family and loyalty schemes.

The pity is that the one big competitive advantage that Gaelic games have, the power to run competitions just the way the association want, continues to go unexploited.

smoran@irishtimes.com