IN ALL FAIRNESS - Screen hurting the live experience

Ultimately, video didn’t kill the radio star, as the song suggested in the late 1970’s, and as it worked out video has died away while radio is still as strong a medium as ever. However, are the mediums of television and live-streaming hurting the live sporting experience?

Particularly, since the Covid pandemic began in March 2020, it has changed peoples habits in terms of how they consume sport. For over a twelve month period, the only way to consume sport was through television or live-streaming, and thank God for it as it was one of the ways that kept us all sane when spectators were prevented from venues. However, has it made spectators too comfortable about getting out of their armchair and consuming action live which is always the best experience.

People can become lazy and after getting used to having all Premier League games available to them for a period, and then the GAA live-streaming all games online when venues were close to the public, it offered a different way for their games to be consumed, however not for the best.

I’d argue that we are over-saturated in terms of sport. Soccer is now almost a seven day a week television show. It’s gotten to a stage where, apart from Liverpool games, I don’t watch any others, even if the big teams are playing against each other. A few years ago, I could take you which teams were going well in the lower tiers and who the Ireland players were playing for, I couldn’t tell you now. I’d have to check who is top of the English Championship table.

People got spoiled during Covid. RTE show way more sport than they ever used to, including more recently club GAA, and they will be in FBD Semple Stadium this Saturday evening for the clash between Drom & Inch and Loughmore/Castleiney. However, there have been some grumblings that they aren’t staying on air to show the second quarter final between Kilruane MacDonaghs and Toomevara, since they showed a double-header in the Dublin football championship last Saturday. That is because they are showing the Republic of Ireland men’s team in action against Scotland on Saturday night, and as much as some people might not like it, a club championship game in Tipperary cannot compete against a big international soccer game.However, Tipp GAA TV will pick up the slack and show that quarter final on Saturday evening, as well as the two quarter finals on Sunday.

Live streaming has been one of the great developments over the last two and a half years, but it is also a negative as if you become used to it, you might find it handier to pay the ten euro and watch online instead of making the trip to Thurles to watch it live.

What we also learned during Covid is that crowds at sporting events matter. It just wasn’t the same without spectators. Even when just 200 people were allowed into county finals in the autumn of 2020, it was still better than nothing, and they added to the occasion.

However, we need to get more people back. The crowds at the Galway Races were down this year in comparison to its last full year of 2019, while the turnout for the recent Irish Champions Weekend at the Curragh, even allowing for the bad weather, is concerning.

It’s the same in greyhound racing where apart from the trainers and owners, the thrill of the big night out at the dogs has largely gone. Even in rugby, inter-provincials between the Irish provinces don’t sell out any more. There were vast seats in Ravenhill empty last Saturday for Ulster v Connacht for the first game of the season where after being without rugby for three-four months, you would have expected a bigger turnout, but it wasn’t to be. It didn’t help that the match was live on three different television stations, TG4, BBC and Premier Sports.

The modern sporting consumer also wants more. The day of just assuming people will turn up out of loyalty is gone. The GAA are very poor in this regard. Their promotion of fixtures is very poor, and yet they seem happy in the inter-county leagues and championships with vast swathes of grounds empty, instead of them having people in them.

Of all the offices the GAA has, it doesn’t have a marketing department and it badly needs one. Each County Board also needs a marketing officer whose job is to promote the upcoming action where games are hyped up, competitions, free tickets, anything that can be done to make it an occasion. In this era of social media, people will follow the hype.