Before the players take to the field at Lansdowne Road tomorrow, the Irish Rugby Football Union will have pocketed a cool £1 million from the latest wave of cash to hit the Five Nations Championship.
For the first time, the tournament has a title sponsor, Lloyds TSB, which has agreed to pay £12 million (€15.24 million) over two years to the home unions.
The deal will net the IRFU £2 million in total although it could be worth even more if Lloyds decides to extend its involvement to 2001, when Italy is due to become the competition's sixth nation.
All good news for a union which is enjoying something of an annus mirabilis this year. On and off the pitch results are going its way: between Ulster's European Cup run which culminated in last Saturday's profitable final at IRFU headquarters and the Supreme Court's decision last month to allow the union to hold pop concerts at Lansdowne Road without planning permission, ending a protracted legal battle.
Then, there's the World Cup to look forward to later this year. A number of potentially lucrative group matches will be held on Irish soil before the final in November in Wales.
It was not as if the IRFU was having problems raising sponsorship funds of its own either. Indeed, the Lloyds arrangement highlighted the union's embarrassment of riches when it came to corporate backing as it threatened to derail a £350,000-a-year sponsorship contract with Irish Permanent.
The fact that the IRFU managed to persuade the Irish company to surrender its sponsorship rights for Five Nations games, while retaining its backing of the team and other, comparatively low-profile matches, is a testament to the union's ability to secure faithful, long-term patrons.
"No other organisation has been as successful in attracting and keeping sponsors," says Mr Padraig Slattery, managing director of Slattery PR, which operates the IRFU's corporate hospitality facility. "Rugby recognised the need for sponsors to enable the game to grow long before other games. It is 20 years since the days of the Digital-sponsored matches. Since then, the IRFU has actively courted the commercial market.
"The fact that the game appeals to an A/B type audience has helped in attracting companies, especially financial institutions and the like, although it is now also beginning to attract other audiences."
The union receives an estimated £1.5 million a year from its main sponsors, namely Irish Permanent, Nike, AIB, Guinness and Ford. Nothing, it seems, is spared from being sold whether it's the East Stand, which has been renamed with the Guinness tag, or the pitch itself, on which two advertising spots are being sold for the first time this year at a cost of £25,000 a piece for each of the games against France and England.
Among fans, however, such commercialism is less warmly received, especially when they see the stands packed out on match days with corporate guests.
It is the case that sponsors and other high-spending executives are guaranteed prime seats at Lansdowne Road but the IRFU insists their allocation is small. Only 300 seats are reserved for corporate hospitality at the 48,500-seater stadium, compared to 3,000 at England's 80,000-seater Twickenham ground, and 6,000 at Cardiff's 65,000-seater Millennium Stadium for the World Cup finals.
"If the IRFU wanted to make more money out of corporate hospitality they could do so but they have consciously decided to limit the numbers, ensuring the clubs get between 8590 per cent of the tickets," says Mr Slattery.
Of the corporate seats at Lansdowne Road, he says: "We could have sold the Ireland versus France game three times over and the Ireland versus England game five times over." Already, corporate tickets for the home game against England in 2001 are sold out.
As well as a grandstand seat, the £360 corporate ticket includes a drinks reception, five-course lunch and post-match meal with a former rugby international guest speaker. No company is allowed to receive more than 40 such tickets for any particular game.
But buying designated corporate tickets is not the only means by which companies obtain tickets.
Many have block booked 10-year season tickets at a cost of £2,000 each. In excess of 3,500 such tickets have been sold in the past three years, guaranteeing a seat at all home games with the exception of the World Cup. While one had to be a member of a rugby club to buy such a ticket, many people purchased them on behalf of companies.
The corporate sector also has the opportunity of getting tickets from clubs which buy them through ordinary channels and then sell them on as part of a hospitality package.
For Ireland's home game against England two years ago, one Dublin club made about £45,000 by offering part of its ticket allocation to corporate sponsors. For £300, it provided a match ticket with champagne reception, lunch and dinner.
As professionalism further develops within the game and clubs begin to seek new sources of income to meet growing wage demands and other costs, the fear is that more tickets will go this route.
The IRFU, for all its good fortune, is also facing higher costs with a players' wage bill this year of £3.5 million, roughly two-thirds of its total income in the year ending May 1998.
A major capital expenditure is also looming large as the union considers what to do about Lansdowne Road and its much-needed renovation. It has yet to commit to any one of three options: construct a new stadium on the existing site; develop a new facility at Newlands Cross in west Dublin; or run with the Government's proposed new national stadium in Clondalkin.
Whatever it decides to do, it will be costly and the temptation to increase its lucrative corporate ticket allocation will be hard to resist. Unless, it can increase the financial commitment of its existing sponsors or attract even more of the same.
Nothing would be more helpful in this regard than an upturn in the fortunes of the Irish team. No better time for that to start than tomorrow.
