No need for GAA to panic over summer's distractions

The Euro 2012 finals and London Olympics will compete for the hearts and minds of sports fans but history shows that the effects are temporary

THIS WEEK sees the first shots fired in the battle for hearts and minds during what will be a busy sporting summer. The announcement of the Ireland team for next month’s Euro 2012 was a reminder that for only the fifth time the GAA is going to have to go head-to-head with a major soccer tournament in which this country is competing.

On Friday all counties will be having an open day to raise the profile of their championship campaigns. There is also the promise of the “most comprehensive marketing plan ever undertaken” by the GAA to counter the international attractions of the soccer and in August, the London Olympics.

Director General Páraic Duffy spelled it out in this year’s annual report: “Additional factors this year will be the enormous media exposure devoted to the European soccer championships and the London Olympics, and the increased competition for the attention of the Irish sporting public that these events will create.

“Our games will be no less attractive, but, irrespective of any marketing or ticketing initiatives we undertake, much of the interest generated in our games is dependent on the space and time given to them by the national media.

“From October to May our games receive less coverage than rugby and English soccer; if our games this summer are under-reported on account of wall-to-wall coverage of soccer and the Olympics, championship attendances will be adversely affected.”

Whereas it was characteristically meticulous of Duffy to anticipate the challenge of Euro 2012 and obviously any move to enhance the marketing of the championships is a good idea in itself, it’s also reasonable to advise the GAA not to get too panicky about what’s on the way.

He’s right that attendances will suffer during Euro 2012 but the established precedent in that regard also suggests that crowds recover almost immediately.

The Olympics, unless there’s major Irish success and even with that, will have no impact whatsoever – any more than they did in previous years.

The impact on attendances of soccer tournaments in which Ireland are competing isn’t purely a matter of direct clashes, but more to do with the public mood. When everyone’s attention is on the competition it’s very hard for football and hurling to engage the attention of sports supporters.

Experience has been that although there have been very few direct fixture clashes, attendances during the weeks of tournaments have suffered.

Even at blue-chip events the statistical effect on attendances has been noticeable during the most recent tournaments for which Ireland qualified. Twice in 1994 only 23,000 turned up for the Dublin-Kildare Leinster draw and replay. Cork and Kerry pulled in fewer than 27,000. The previous year, the same fixtures had attracted 60,000 and 43,000 respectively.

In 2002 Cork and Kerry drew 30,425 (admittedly on the day of the Spain-Ireland match, which had however concluded before throw-in) whereas the previous year a crowd of 41,458 had attended.

Yet in both cases, gate receipts for the season as a whole had increased by the end of the championship.

Furthermore in promotional terms, Dublin marked 2002 by winning a first Leinster in seven years in the redeveloped Croke Park and Armagh people hardly remember the year because we nearly beat Spain on penalties. Similarly eight years previously Giants Stadium may have been a seismic event but Leitrim people’s memories of 1994 won’t stray that far.

Local triumphs always make their own indelible mark.

In a way the GAA is a victim of its own success. The huge rise in attendance figures over the past two decades has created an expectation, which maybe obscures how far the championship has come as a mass-appeal phenomenon.

As Duffy has been at pains to point out in recent years, attendances depend on so many factors that the figures give only broad indications and caution is required before jumping to conclusions.

Allowing for that, the trend has been down since 2007 when the GAA enjoyed what stands as a record level of gate receipts, slightly more than €30 million.

The fall since then hasn’t been enormous and in fact attendances have held remarkably steady with a fall in receipts accounted for by the greater range of promotional pricing. But the product has been transformed. It’s been helped by the emergence of different counties at various stages and more obviously by the reform of championship structures that has created a larger schedule of big match days.

Back in the pre-qualifier days, All-Irelands could be won by playing a handful of matches fixed at leisurely intervals throughout the summer. There were so few big fixtures, that spectators had to catch them while they could. Things are different now but they’re also more costly. Contesting an All-Ireland will generally mean three trips to Croke Park for a football team and sometimes the same goes for hurling, an expensive enough undertaking for a family.

Not only are there more matches being played in the championship but all of the interesting ones – and quite a few of the others – will be accessible on television, a disincentive that didn’t apply in the 1970s and ’80s, a period when crowds weren’t exactly pouring through the turnstiles.

So the GAA is now accountable to a standard of aggregate attendances that showed dramatic increases up until five years ago. Even last year’s decline in championship turnout was offset to an extent by bigger league crowds, largely attributable to Dublin’s Spring Series initiative and in any event returned the association only to the same level as 2005 – not exactly a crash.

There’s no reason to believe that the GAA can’t take next month in its stride but the more nagging anxiety is simply the drastic contraction in disposable income and the hardship currently being suffered by so many ordinary people, many of whom spent freely to follow their counties in better times.

By all means promote and innovate as much as possible but Euro 2012 isn’t going to be the main challenge of the short-term future. Ireland have done very well in the soccer tournaments they have contested – getting out of their group on each occasion except in Euro 88 and even then the defeat of England was probably Irish soccer’s supernova moment.

Then again international success can’t be guaranteed but the GAA know that Dublin will be back in Croke Park defending their All-Ireland when Poland-Ukraine is being filed in Uefa headquarters. Que sera sera.