New deal a good result for players and GAA

ON GAELIC GAMES:The agreed protocol promises peaceful co-existence for the foreseeable future between the GAA and its intercounty players

WHILE BEING encouraged to explore the ways in which his county was competing with the Leinster rugby team, Dublin county CEO John Costello made a central, obvious point when launching the promotional Spring Series: “. . . Dublin can command figures of 60,000-plus attending our matches during the summer. Reaching out to those people is the idea behind this and to become more commercial. Unfortunately we don’t have the same staffing structures as Leinster. We’re an amateur organisation and rely on funds from our members and clubs.”

On the upside, it might have been pointed out, neither do Dublin nor any other county have to contend with players’ contracts and wage bills even if the cost of maintaining a top-level intercounty presence is expensive.

It’s likely to have been a parallel development given that the marketing possibilities for Gaelic games in the capital since the redevelopment of Croke Park have been sporadically mobilised by the GAA in Dublin before the Leinster phenomenon became fully airborne in the past couple of years.

The idea of putting Dublin up against All-Ireland champions in the NFL at headquarters has happened a couple of times previously but last week’s announcement was the first time that a league campaign has been formulated on that basis.

Key to promotions of this type is the availability of good-quality spare capacity, which allows the organisers to bring down admission prices, push the event relentlessly and hope that a big crowd materialises, which in general it usually does.

Recent examples in other sports include the FAI Cup final at the end of last year, which brought 36,000 to Lansdowne Road at a tenner a shot, and a few weeks later the heavily advertised and attractively priced Leinster-Clermont Auvergne European Cup clash created a pool attendance record of 44,873.

The one reservation about Dublin’s forthcoming initiative is that sustaining the dose over four matches could prove difficult. The floodlit NFL opening matches against Tyrone in 2009 and ’07 for instance were once-off events rather than part of a series.

A sequence of matches requires momentum and if the early fixtures go poorly for Dublin it will be hard to pull in the sort of crowds that will justify the use of Croke Park. But it is an admirable project even down to musical entertainment, which is calculated to draw in a number of children, a proportion of whom may enjoy the rest of the night’s fare (it’s said football suffers from the comparison when staged after a hurling match and Jedward may provide a more flattering context).

If all goes well for Dublin, it will be a pointer for other units although there has already been plenty of evidence of the GAA’s willingness to discount tickets in promotional packages over the past 12 months or so.

John Costello was right about the difficulties posed by the intercounty season and championship structure, which he described as “crazy” with its lopsidedness and uncertainty militating against planned promotions but those structures aren’t likely to change any time in the near future. County teams however remain the biggest game in town when it comes to advertising the GAA.

That’s why there was further good news for the association with the publication of the protocol agreed between Croke Park and the Gaelic Players Association, which formalises the decision taken in principle at last year’s congress.

Disquiet among players has created administrative and commercial headaches for the GAA in recent years and the recognition of the GPA as the accepted representative body of intercounty players has placed a vital relationship on a sounder footing.

Details of the accord published on Monday still have to be passed by Central Council but, with the president, director general and management committee all in support, it’s likely to be in operation by next month.

In return for formal recognition in the rule book and less than €2 million per annum to cover a variety of welfare and support schemes, which arguably should be in place anyway, the GAA have secured an unambiguous commitment to amateurism on behalf of the players and a structure in which any problems of the type familiar from Cork and Limerick can be addressed.

It also provides for the winding down of the GPA’s various commercial sponsorships, including the players’ All Stars (which is a pity, as most sports manage to encompass a players’ awards scheme as well as a journalists’) as well as for the GAA to share in the proceeds of any new schemes.

There remained some concerns about the final text of the agreement. Jarlath Burns, formerly chair of the “official” Players Advisory Committee and now Armagh Central Council delegate, who had in the past crossed swords with the GPA, sought clarification on the commercial issue of image rights.

Burns was correct to confront any ambiguity on this point, as it has been a flashpoint for relations between players and the GAA in the past, most significantly when a video game was launched on the Sony Playstation platform but didn’t feature recognisable players, as would be the case with the big-selling soccer titles.

The recognition protocol ingeniously defuses the problem by referring all such matters to the joint commercial initiative outlined in section 2.4 of the protocol. In other words the matter of image rights will be thrashed out in the context of any proposed deals involving video games or any other commercial exploitations of image.

Those joint commercial schemes that come under the remit of the protocol will see the revenues split evenly between the GPA and GAA, whose share will go to the Player Injury scheme, effectively subsidising its cost to clubs.

Does the agreement mean conflict between players and the GAA has been removed for all time or that image rights won’t become a sticking point for some future generation of players? No, but the protocol does promise peaceful co-existence for the foreseeable future, which makes for one of the country’s more upbeat medium-term forecasts.