WE realise that the Sky Sports deal was the national (and international) crisis of the week the week before last so forgive us for delving into it again. It’s just that the more time passes, and the more information that comes out, the more we get the impression that the GAA’s upper echelon are making it up as they go along.
The latest twist on the road to our summer of Super Sundays has been the news that none of the games covered by Sky will be available in Britain on the new RTE web-streaming service. Those games will be the property of Sky.
So if you want to watch the All-Ireland finals or 18 other games then you’re going to have to subscribe to Sky Sports. Or go to the pub.
“Nearly every pub in Britain has Sky Sports. It will be very easy for people to access the games. I don’t see that being a problem in Britain. I honestly don’t believe it will be an issue at all,” GAA director general Paraic Duffy told Ronan McGreevy of The Irish Times.
Those of us that live in Britain know that most pubs don’t have Sky Sports. And those of us in London have watched the alarming rise of the gastro pub, with TVs being pulled out and blackboards going up. Match of the Day has been replaced by Catch of the Day, with fennel infusion and buttered organic vegetables.
Anyway, the decline of local boozers is not the GAA’s problem. Where it gets confusing is how they are saying ‘it’s no problem you can go to the pub’. Only at home they’re absolutely refuting the idea that they’re forcing families to the pub. They’re saying that most games are on free-to-air TV, only 14 are on Sky. If you really want to see it then do what people have always done – go to the game!
Well, you can’t really go to the game so easily if you live in north London.
So you lot go to the pub. You at home go to the game. Just stop whinging and leave us alone!
To our mind, blocking the RTE player in Britain is bad form. It’s an inevitable result, though, once you get down to negotiating with the likes of Sky.
You can imagine Rupert Murdoch’s execs looking at this thinking: so we give you a load of money and hope to make it back by selling subscriptions. But there’s this internet service that will undercut us and will show every game live. Are you having a laugh? We’ll have that shut down for our broadcasts, thanks.
This is absolutely the logical approach for Sky to take. They’re in the business of turning a profit – nothing else. The GAA say there were no alternative TV stations to broadcast the games free to air. It was Sky or nothing. So they did the best they could.
Yes, they did, but there are winners and losers here. Sky are winners. The GAA are winners in that they’ve done their deal and are going to make some money to reinvest into the organisation.
What about the people in Britain who want to watch the games – some them GAA members some of them not – how do they benefit?
Well, it’s hard to see how they do. Previously they could subscribe to Premier Sports for a tenner a month and see the vast majority of televised championship games – albeit there were some high-profile cock ups such as the time Rugby League’s Northern Rail Cup final between Featherstone and Halifax was televised instead of the All-Ireland hurling quarter finals.
Now if they want to watch the Championship they must pay upwards of £40 to Sky a month and subscribe to Premier Sports – or else go the pub.
Where it all gets really confusing is that this is supposed to be the deal for emigrants.
“There are far more people abroad than ever before. The GAA family abroad is bigger than ever before. We could not ignore those people. This is why we chose to do it in the way that we did it,” said Duffy.
If you are in Australia then all games will be shown free to air on Channel 7 so Duffy is correct in what he says here. But if the “GAA family abroad”, as he puts it, has a poor relation then it’s Britain – or perhaps we should say rich relation because that’s what they’d need to be to afford to follow the championship on their television.
Trouble is, as Duffy and everybody else know, most of us aren’t rich at all.
Trying to sell a deal where emigrants in Britain (the land of over half-a-million Irish people and 86 GAA clubs) must pay hundreds of pounds a season to watch their favourite teams and package it as the emigrants deal – now that is rich.
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