Gavin Cooney

AND SOON FRIDAY nights will once again be scored to the clank and fizz and blink-blink-blink of the floodlights; the lights that shade the grass a deeper kind of green and trace the widening outline of dissipating smoke. 

But this year there won’t be the addition of RTÉ’s roving, fitful spotlight. For the next four years, the league won’t appear on the national broadcaster, as it has set up home on Virgin Media instead. 

The league have decided it’s better to have salaried work off-broadway than occasionally freelance among the stars. 

Virgin gazumped RTÉ with the currency of time, rather than cash. The clubs wanted a live game to be broadcast every Friday night, to which Virgin, but not RTÉ, were willing to commit. 

Consistency of exposure, the clubs correctly argue, is the only means of building an audience. Sky Sports helped assemble the Premier League monster by marketing slots before the matches – Super Sunday, Monday Night Football – and the LOI finally has a broadcaster wiling to develop their Friday night version of the same. 

The Premier League has succeeded because it’s basically a camp television drama, telling rudimentary stories of managers under pressure and teams in crisis; of insurgent underdogs and petty sideline fall-outs and banter, fume, and trolling. 

The LOI can comfortably compete with the Premier League on a per-capita basis on all of the above, but it hasn’t had the medium through which to tell them. Card-carrying fans will find them online and on podcasts, but our old friend, the Floating Voter, has had no means of consistently following them.

RTÉ’s bookending approach to coverage, coupled with the disappearance of eir Sport, meant the middle chunk of recent seasons simply vanished from TV. This was a nonsense accepted by clubs and the FAI for much too long. If a season is a three-act play, the LOI screened the Setup and the Resolution, but took the Confrontation backstage. It put Chekov’s gun into decommission. 

Happily, Virgin have agreed to change all of that from this year, while RTÉ decided it wasn’t for them. Seen through a coldly commercial lens, RTÉ made the right decision, as handing over more than 30 Friday nights to the LOI this year would have meant a drop in viewing figures. 

The average viewership for an LOI game last season was 69,461 – RTÉ get more than that for the United Rugby Championship games and the odd U20s rugby game. Plus, as RTÉ always remind us, they are not solely a sports broadcaster and have other broadcast commitments too, apparently not all of them to Dermot Bannon.  

But of course we then quickly arrive at the RTÉ Paradox: are they not meant to be a public service broadcaster? Do they not have a national obligation to screen the national football league every week, and thus offer it an opportunity to thrive?

To which the answer is yes. But also no.

RTÉ are the public service broadcaster with commercial necessities, a classically ambiguous existence in a country with as little interest in firm markers and outline as Ireland. The LOI’s sheer length has made it a victim of this equivocacy. 

But in their pragmatism, RTÉ are guilty of a tremendous lack of vision. 

Instead, it will be Virgin who will benefit as the home of a competition whose trajectory is unquestionably on the rise. 

Average viewership of just shy of 70,000 may be uninspiring in the context of other things you could screen on a Friday night, but the FAI say that is a 42% rise on the average figures for games in the previous season. 

With consistent coverage along with the airtime to ventilate personalities like Damien Duff, Stephen Bradley, John Caulfield and Stephen Kenny, no further increases in audience are inconceivable. 

Eight days out from the new season, Virgin already know they have a year ahead of them as the exclusive home of Mason Melia, the Tottenham-bound prospect about whom anyone with a passing interest in Irish sport is curious. 

Official Ireland is also taking notice. 

The annual Onside industry report is generally acknowledged as the gold-standard survey in the Irish sports sponsorship world, and its 19th edition was released last month. It surveyed 89 industry professionals, 17% of whom said the strongest growth opportunities from this year will come in football, ranking the sport third in sports behind rugby and GAA. (For context, the equivalent figure for football was 10% last year and just 7% in 2022.)

But take a look at the trajectory. The gap between GAA and football in the 2022 edition of the survey was 28%, whereas for 2025 it has shrunk to just 7%.

This is proof of the looming price to be paid by the GAA for its disinterest in the media, of course, and justification of the LOI’s comparative openness. 

But even more interesting is a closer focus on those who touted football as the best sponsorship bet for the year ahead. Of them, 8% said the greater opportunities lay in the FAI’s national teams, whereas 13% identified the League of Ireland as their primary target. The LOI outperforming the national teams on any metric is a staggering thing for those who still hear “difficult child” ringing in their ears. 

Of course, RTÉ’s sports schedule is currently packed with competitions built by rival broadcasters, most obviously TG4′s early investment in club GAA games along with the rugby artist formerly known as the Celtic League. The LOI’s long-term ambition is to walk a similar path to these, and the test will be when the rights return to the market in four years’ time. 

That’s a long way into the future, however, and those years will feel longer for RTÉ than anyone else.