Somewhere deep in the bowels of Croke Park, someone is finalising the calculations for how many people attended all the matches in this year’s Gaelic football and hurling championships – a reliable barometer of the health of the games. The rest of the association is waiting with some trepidation to see what they will be.
Already people have begun to worry. In a number of key games in the season just gone, the numbers were not heartening. Take the Leinster football final, traditionally one of the biggest days in the Gaelic games calendar. Just 23,113 people turned up for the game between Dublin and Louth this summer, meaning three out of every four seats were empty.
That’s just one game, of course, and both the Munster hurling championship and the Ulster football championship are thriving, while the All-Ireland football and hurling finals were, predictably, sell-outs.
However, there were plenty of games like the Leinster final, where the attendance was shockingly low. And few people in the GAA will have been comfortable with a second year of low attendances at key matches, not least because it has a material impact on the association’s revenue.
All of which puts great pressure on Croke Park, which is not just the main stadium of the GAA but its commercial engine room. If ticket sales are slipping, the Jones’s Road venue might have to be squeezed even harder to compensate.
Concerts
Just how important is Croke Park to the wider association? Very, according to financial accounts. But, as the most recent set of those accounts for the stadium show, it had a bit of a dip last year. The stadium’s overall turnover to the end of September 2023 was €42 million, down from €52.4 million the year before, a drop of almost 20 per cent.
That wasn’t necessarily all related to gate receipts in Croke Park. In fact, the stadium’s match day income rose in 2023. Having hosted three more games than the year before, that source of revenue grew from €8 million to €8.3 million. Similarly, season ticket income rose for the year, from €13.8 million to €15.6 million.
Where it suffered a significant fall in income was from the “hire of facilities”, by which it mostly means big concerts. In 2022, for example, the stadium made €5.3 million in rental revenue, during which period it hosted seven concerts. In 2023, by comparison, it held no concerts and made just €722,589 from hiring itself out. That’s a drop of €4.6 million.
That lack of concerts also had a knock on impact on catering revenues. Overall, its conference and catering revenues were down from €19.3 million to €13.2 million, the accounts show.
The stadium still made a profit for the year but it was far lower than the previous year – down from €17 million to €11.4 million. And most of that was down to a one-off financial benefit of €8.7 million from a portion of the proceeds of the sale of lands at Clonliffe College in 2022.
Nevertheless, the stadium was able to pay a dividend to the GAA of €15 million, roughly in line with the €17 million it paid out in 2022, from its overall retained earnings of €131.9 million. That’s no small figure in the overall sum of the GAA finances. In 2023, the association made €112 million in revenue, down from €128 million the year before.
The association’s annual report shows that outside of Croke Park, gate receipts actually rose – from €33.5 million in 2022 to €38.5 million in 2023. However, this was largely down to the restructured schedule of matches, with the introduction of the likes of the Tailteann Cup – the secondary football championship – and with 40 more games over the summer months.
It is clear from the GAA’s annual report that they weren’t particularly happy with those figures: 40 games, they seem to believe, ought to have produced a higher income. As the accounts note, “attendance levels at these new games were modest, with increases expected in 2024, as the format becomes more established”.
Things were similarly depressed in relation to the association’s commercial income, which dropped from €27.2 million to €21.9 million, a drop of €5.3 million, as “two key media players left the GAA market”. The association’s own effort to bridge that gap – GAAGO – has been at best a mixed success.
Capital spending
This dip in revenue comes at a particularly inopportune time for the GAA, when there is a greater than ever demand for the money it makes and distributes through the rest of the association.
As well as its regular funding of the ordinary business of Gaelic games around Ireland, and helping to fund the increasingly expensive business of running a county team, the GAA estimates there is about €200 million in capital spending going on in county grounds and centres of excellence around the country, with the GAA making contributions towards projects in Waterford, Kildare, Louth, New York, Galway and Limerick.
In the GAA’s most recent annual report, director general Tom Ryan warned that “ongoing inflationary pressure and rising costs of capital projects will make the delivery, scale and number of capital projects an ever increasing challenge for the association”. With expanding costs and finite resources, not everyone will be able to get a grant, he wrote.
Then there’s the cost of the merger with ladies’ football and camogie, and the possibility that the GAA will have to step in to bridge gaps in funding from the immigrant investor programme, cash from which would be “slow to come to fruition”, he warned.
As Ryan noted in the annual report: “Central council 10-year forecasts indicate that annual surpluses alone will not be sufficient to adequately fund these ambitions.”
To some extent, that’s the normal outcome of the GAA’s great growth over the last few decades, according to Nickey Brennan, who served as the president of the GAA between 2006 and 2009.
“The GAA’s income has grown, the value of the GAA’s sponsorship has grown, and it has created a greater value. Meanwhile, the cost of running the operation has also grown, so the GAA has to look at newer and creative ways to generate revenue,” he said.
It has been busy doing so in recent weeks. In July, they broke ground on a new, 200-bedroom hotel on land nearby, which will generate more revenue for the association.
Going beyond that, however, gets a bit complicated. As Brennan pointed out, the GAA can make plenty of money, but “the remit of the people in the GAA is to explore opportunities that fit in with the GAA’s ethos”.
On ticket prices, for example, the association has to be very careful. The perception of gouging fans is never a good look for any sporting organisation, but the GAA has to be more careful than a Premier League soccer team or even the rugby provinces in its pricing.
For Brennan, the most recent increase in the price was necessary, limited, and judicious, just €5 on the price of an All-Ireland final ticket.
“Look, €100 is a big price for a ticket but if you compare it to other sports around the world, it probably isn’t overly expensive,” he said. “You might say the GAA is being opportunist, but to be fair it hasn’t been increased in a long time, and I’d imagine it will be a long time before there is another attempt to increase the price of a finals ticket.”
If the prices can’t rise any further, the numbers of people buying them must. In May, the GAA’s central council indicated that gate receipts for non-provincial games in both hurling and football – which, recall, were only “modest” last year – were actually down on that figure by €500,000.
Bums on seats
So what’s gone wrong exactly? Some have blamed the calendar changes made to accommodate the club game. Some critics argue these have put the start of the championships into direct conflict with the end of the soccer and rugby seasons, and the climax of the championships into conflict with Irish summer holidays.
Then there’s the quality of Gaelic football at the moment, with many calling for rule changes to make the games less defensive, more open and flowing. Better games, the argument goes, will be better able to draw paying fans.
For Mick O’Keeffe, Irish chief executive of consultancy firm Teneo, and himself a former Dublin footballer, that’s a legitimate criticism of at least part of the championship season.
“When it comes to gates, I firmly think the modern consumer of sport is savvy. If the product hasn’t been great, you will get a drop,” he said. “And in some of the early rounds of the football, the games have lacked jeopardy and competitiveness and that adds to making the games less attractive in some instances.”
Get the product right, O’Keeffe believes, and it will remedy the problem of bums on seats.
Where will further revenue come from? Ryan, in the last GAA annual report, flagged up the possibility of grounds other than Croke Park being opened up to further games. “The time for imaginative thinking and a different approach to facilities is upon us ... we cannot allow our ambitions to be constrained by a lack of ambition,” he wrote.
Mick O’Keeffe expects to see more rugby matches pencilled in for GAA stadiums, as well as NFL and soccer down the line, and more concerts around the country.
Meanwhile GAAGO – which has been the source of much-documented criticism, and which has already seen the GAA put a clutch of matches out to tender after gentle nudging by the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission – believes the GAA will put a chunk of matches out to tender again.
However, O’Keeffe believes that far from being a source of controversy, the streaming service could be the platform of something even more ambitious.
“If it can survive these somewhat inevitable wobbles, the GAA could end up with their own broadcast channel” showing games that wouldn’t ordinarily be free to air. “Maybe it will evolve into a GAA TV type operation.”
Whatever happens, O’Keefe said the GAA is likely to take the longer view.
“They’ve been extraordinarily successful commercially over the last 30 years, and they’ve been really good at that balance of not over-commercialising the GAA,” he said. “My understanding is that they tend to look at revenue over a four or five-year cycle, rather than year-to-year.”
In all likelihood, Croke Park’s commercial engine will drive a bounce-back for the GAA in 2024, thanks in large part to a welter of concerts by Bruce Springsteen, Coldplay and AC/DC, as well as a sell-out rugby match between Leinster and Northampton.
If those flagging parts of the football championship can buck themselves up next year, the gate figures will look less anaemic and the balance sheet less unbalanced. However, should that fail to happen, it’s likely that the pressure on Croke Park to deliver other sources of revenue will only increase.
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