HURLING IS IN a mini crisis.
The past week has seen a national discussion about whether the game should be free to air or behind a streaming paywall. The heated debate focused on the razor-sharp words of Donal Óg Cusack on The Sunday Game, with the former Cork goalkeeper firmly in the ‘hurling for all’ camp. On Monday, his views gained backing from his county compatriot Tánaiste Micheál Martin.
But last Saturday evening, another ex-All Ireland winner nailed a punchy point that got lost in the column inches.
Speaking to Off The Ball after Wexford’s defeat to Dublin, All Ireland- winning forward Tom Dempsey said, “My issue with GAAGO is that… we’ve a product which I think is one of the greatest in the world. We need to promote that. We didn’t show [Limerick vs Clare] to the public. I just think that’s absolutely crazy. It’s horrendous marketing.”
‘Marketing’ is a word that some in the GAA will roll their eyes at. But in an increasingly competitive Irish sporting landscape, growing the game to more eyes and more players requires marketing nous.
As a former sales manager with the gift of the gab and decades of experience in media, Dempsey knows a thing or two about marketing. In making his point, he hinted at one of the iron-clad laws of modern marketing science. Hurling’s powerbrokers would do well to embrace it.
Modern marketing’s ‘rosetta stone’ is a theory which was popularised in Prof. Byron Sharp’s 2006 book ‘How Brands Grow’ and is employed by brands like Mars, Diageo and Coca Cola. It revealed that the most effective way to grow is not by squeezing more from existing loyal customers, but simply increasing the number of people who buy a brand in a given year.
No matter what you’re selling — chocolate bars, caffeinated drinks or the Liam MacCarthy — engaging fairweather fans is critical.
To do this, the science says that brands should focus on two simple pieces of advice – make your product ‘easy to buy’ and ‘easy to recall’. If you can’t find a product then you can’t consume it. If you don’t recognise it then you won’t buy it.
As Dempsey hinted, sport is no different. ‘Light’ fans are what drives growth, even in much larger sports than hurling.
In the book ‘Soccernomics’ authors Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski detailed that while 36% of the UK population identify as football fans, in an average fortnight, only 1.8m regularly attend games. Football is a huge market filled with light, stay at home fans that clubs try to attract and entice. Most never enter stadiums and many fans support multiple teams across multiple sports. That’s why clubs strive to develop fandom in markets like China, Africa and North America.
In early 2000s, the English Cricket Board decided to move coverage from terrestrial TV to Sky in the early 2000s. The result? Dwindling viewer figures and dwindling cricket participation. The move back to live cricket on the BBC in recent years has been a major shot in the arm for the sport.
As a minority sport, hurling has an even greater need to attract occasional viewers, the sporting polygamists who’ll just as happily watch Munster Rugby or Manchester United as the Munster Championship.
But last weekend Cork v Tipperary and Dublin v Wexford went up against Leinster v Sharks and Glasgow v Munster in the URC.
The rugby games were free to all on RTÉ2; an average audience of 109,000 watched Leinster’s win, while that number jumped to an average of 165,000 for Munster’s. Meanwhile hundreds of Twitter users complained of being unable to watch the hurling.
Live GAA has been behind a paywall on Sky Sports for almost a decade, but GAAGO is different. Sky Sports is far more accessible for most households in the country than GAAGO.
The numbers for Sky viewership were never earth shattering and GAAGO is cheaper on a yearly basis. But GAAGO is not available natively on most TVs. Entering your credit card details and figuring out how to hook up a HDMI cable is a lot trickier than flicking a button on your Sky remote. That’s if your broadband is good enough.
Digital-only access also creates an ‘invisible barrier’ according to an Age Action spokesperson, who this week said that over 600,000 people are effectively digitally excluded from watching GAAGO because they don’t have the required digital skills.
In 2022, Accenture’s research into the Irish population’s ‘digital divide’ found that just under one-third of Irish people self-describe as having poor digital skills. Does the GAA not have a remit to cater for this audience too?
While the short-term commercial success of the GAA is an imperative, decades of marketing research and a host of case studies from similar sports show clearly that putting a ‘minority’ sport deeper behind a digital paywall is a major risk.
Easy to access, free-to-air live TV remains crucial in nurturing fandom and attracting ‘light’ fans to grow the ancient game.
Shane O’Leary is a Marketing Director and a lifelong Wexford hurling fan.
