Gene Taylor has a packed schedule in front of him on a cold, bright Dublin morning in March. Having travelled from his home in Manhattan, Kansas, to Chicago and then on to Dublin, the Kansas State University athletics director has been in the city for less than 24 hours, but he’s already toured the Aviva Stadium and is about to visit the Guinness Storehouse.
Later on, he will meet Tánaiste Simon Harris and other assorted politicos at a dinner in Iveagh House.
The 67-year-old administrator is in the city to promote this year’s Aer Lingus College Football Classic.
Pitting his Kansas State Wildcats against bitter conference rivals, the Iowa State Cyclones, the game at the Aviva Stadium on August 23rd – the season opener for both schools – is expected to draw a sizeable proportion of both teams’ loyal, rabid fan bases. If there is any additional pressure on this year’s instalment of the game – due, say, to the parlous state of EU-US relations at the moment – neither Taylor nor Padraic O’Kane, director and cofounder of the Aer Lingus College Football Classic, are letting on.
At a time when the Government is trying to muster every ounce of political influence it can in Washington DC, events such as the college classic are taking on greater diplomatic and cultural significance than ever. The game is also a proven money-spinner from a domestic economic perspective, largely dwarfing the value added to the economy by other big international sports events.
College football has not been an alien concept to an Irish audience for many years. The game has become almost a perennial on the events calendar since 2016 when Fire and Sole restaurateur O’Kane and his business partner, Notre Dame alumnus John Anthony, took over the running of the event through their Irish American Events company. But even before that, it was an occasional visitor to the Republic.
Dublin has been hosting games on and off since 1988, when the quaintly named Emerald Isle Classic was first played at Croke Park between Boston College and the Army Black Knights. There were games the following year and again in 1993 at Killarney’s Fitzgerald Stadium.
In 1996, Notre Dame played the United States Naval Academy back at GAA HQ. Taylor, then a young assistant athletics director at Navy, played an unexpectedly significant role in the preparations for that match.
Before we sit down for our interview, he recalls arriving at the stadium in the days before the game to find a completely unprepared pitch with no lines painted and grass up to his ankles. Laughing about it now, Taylor says he’s mellowed significantly since then but admits it wasn’t good for his blood pressure at the time. As hosts, it was Navy’s responsibility to ensure the field was ready. That meant the buck, as far as Taylor was concerned, stopped with him, so he rolled up his sleeves and mowed much of the pitch himself.
On the other side of the fence, the cultural learning curve was steep in different ways for O’Kane. Glen Dimplex tycoon and Notre Dame trustee Martin Naughton was one of the driving forces behind the game in 2011.
His family maintains a strong connection to the college series with his son, Neil Naughton, in situ as co-chairman of the event’s board. But it was the elder Naughton and his wife Carmel who gave O’Kane, whose company had a long-standing catering contract with Dimplex, his introduction to the world of US college sports.
“He said there are 11 Notre Dame guys in town,” O’Kane recalls, “Would you go and meet them? They’re bringing a game here next year. The first couple of questions they asked were: Will you look after our tailgate and pep rally? I said: As soon as I google what a tailgate and pep rally is.”
As a product, there is no comparison between what fans would have experienced in previous decades and what will transpire on August 23rd. For one, the grass at the Aviva will be mown and lined out properly.
On the macro level too, O’Kane and company have nailed down the finer details that make the college football classic an event worth attending for US fans.
“John, my business partner, knows college football inside out,” he says. “And we know Ireland. We know how the logistics and everything else works. We kind of joke that John puts them on the plane. I take them off the plane.”
Last year, the Government published a new policy framework for big sporting events, making known its intention to continue pursuing “exciting new future opportunities”, as then minister for tourism Catherine Martin put it. This includes large-scale “mega” events, such as the 2028 European Championship in soccer and more novel outings such as the NFL game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers, which is due to take place in Croke Park in November.
[ NFL in Croke Park: Ireland’s first regular season game coming to Dublin this yearOpens in new window ]
The trouble is that between a worsening bottleneck of prestige summer concerts and other outdoor events, as well as the ever-expanding slate of large-scale sporting occasions throughout the year, it could be argued that Dublin’s events calendar is becoming congested. Hotel room rates and their seemingly inexorable rise since the Covid-19 pandemic have been the most obvious symptom of that malaise.
That the Aer Lingus College Football Classic can, at least provisionally, estimate its actual value to the Irish economy in nine-figure sums is important. From a purely anecdotal perspective, anyone who has been around the city centre the weekend of the big game can attest to the atmosphere created by the congregating droves of US tourists around Dame Street and its environs.
The going rate to host a college football game is understood to be around the $5 million (€4.6 million) mark. This involves an outlay from the State, though a large portion of the cost is borne privately by the event’s corporate sponsors and other entities.
It appears that the juice is worth the squeeze from a value perspective. Last year’s game between Florida State and Georgia Tech was worth an estimated €146 million to the Republic’s economy, according to Grant Thornton, a sponsor of the event, which published an economic impact report on the game recently. About 25,900 people travelled from the US to Ireland for the game, most of them staying for an average of seven nights.
The College Football Classic’s secret sauce is that the games are lined up far in advance, ideally several years, giving fans from the competing institutions ample time to plan their trips. Many will build a holiday around the game and travel around the country, spreading the benefits of their expenditure, something the tourism authorities here are keen to promote.
The jury is out as to whether the NFL’s outing in Croke Park later this year will generate anything like that benefit for the domestic economy.
The NFL has been ramping up its number of international games in recent times. But that strategy is more about developing the game in new markets rather than bringing hordes of fans over from the States.
Certainly, the game is likely to attract a smattering of Americans and a more sizeable cohort of fans from all over Ireland, Britain and elsewhere in Europe. But for the reported $10 million that the game is going to cost the State – practically double the going rate for a college game – the economic benefits are less clear.
“I think they’re two different products,” O’Kane says. “Both are going to be amazing games of sport.”
Off the pitch, however, he says: “There’s no question that the tourism and business connections are far stronger with college games, ensuring a bigger economic return than anything the NFL can bring. Part of our business model is to bring in at least 50 per cent of the stadium from the US and a certain proportion from Europe, and we’re on track to do that.”
The economics also work for the colleges involved. That might not be the case in the future, however, and competition to host lucrative college games at larger, neutral-site NFL stadiums in the US is becoming stiffer.
“We’ve got a great contract,” Taylor says. “Don’t get me wrong, we’ll make more net than we would with a home game because our expenses are mostly covered. But the guarantee, that’s almost going to become a competitive thing because I could maybe get a chance to move a neutral-site game and it would cost me a lot less.”
The benefit of playing it in Dublin is the experience for the players. “That’s just way different from just going to Green Bay.”
Back on the field, this year’s instalment in the series promises to be one of the more atmospheric in the history of the event. Affectionately known as “Farmageddon” by fans of the two teams, owing to the agricultural roots of the two universities, this year’s rivalry game is expected to attract a significant number of fans from the United States. Some 19,000 are already confirmed to travel.
“We’ve almost got a 50:50 match from the two schools,” O’Kane said. “So the rivalry is going to be really good whereas in the past, Florida State were by far the biggest audience last year, Nebraska before that.”
Kansas State’s biggest rival is Kansas University. Iowa State, their opponents in this year’s game, is a close second. “This has become, from a football perspective, probably one of our other big rivalries,” Taylor says. “Our fan bases are so similar. There’s just so many similarities between the two schools and the games have always – or mostly – been really close.”
And what of the Wildcats’ chances? “I tell people all the time,” Taylor says, “I take full credit for all the wins, and I blame the coaches for the losses.”
Joking aside, he says fans can expect a “great game because it’s going to be a hype game. The coaches get along really well but they both really want to win. So there’s going to be an intensity level for that first game of the year.”
