Cork GAA's (massive) own goal
Cork County Board have lost this round in the battle to sell the naming rights of Páirc Uí Chaoimh.
What a week, what a month, what a year for news, and 2024 is only 17 days old. Meanwhile, Cork GAA is having its biggest moment since the county won the double in 1990.
In case you missed it, Cork County Board met behind closed doors last night, January 16, in what it stated afterwards was just a business-as-usual meeting about ongoing discussions regarding a commercial tie-up with SuperValu.
LOL.
The day before The Irish Examiner broke the story that the County Board was all but ready to sign on the dotted line in a €1 million deal with Musgrave-owned SuperValu, which would see the supermarket chain granted the naming rights to the 45,000-capacity stadium and the end of Páirc Uí Chaoimh, well in name anyway.
Hello, SuperValu Páirc.
Cue: incredulity, shock, horror, and anger on Leeside. Could Cork County Board be that craven, or broke, or just out of touch?
The pile-on featured everyone from local TD and Tánaiste Micheál Martin tweeting that he was "deeply disappointed and annoyed" by the GAA’s plans.
Dónal O Caoimh, grandson of Pádraig Ó Caoimh, former GAA director-general - after whom Páirc Uí Chaoimh was named - told Drivetime that he was “shocked and saddened that SuperValu would consider making the eradication of my grandfather’s legacy a condition of sponsorship.”
Lovely hurling there, Dónal.
Lord Mayor Cllr Kieran McCarthy on Today with Claire Byrne highlighted the historical legacy of the stadium, the man it's named after, but also the contributions of SuperValu to Irish society, saying that "If it was SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoimh or Páirc Uí Chaoimh with SuperValu, that would be fantastic.”
Would that really be fantastic? That sounds very much like what a politician who wants to have his cake from the SuperValu bakery and eat it.
The Tánaiste, in his arch tweet, brought up an interesting point when he said the government of the day stumped up €30m for the redevelopment nearly 10 years ago and “never sought naming rights."
Well, fool on them (and us), because maybe they should have as a condition for giving the GAA nearly half the budget for redevelopment. A decade is a (very) long time in politics, and quite a few people in Cork were once again amazed at how much the State allocated to the redevelopment.
In Cork County Board’s defence, they never hid the fact that generating money from selling the naming rights of Páirc Uí Chaoimh was part of the plan. It’s there in black and white in the County Board’s Business Plan from 2015. (See below). Now, having a plan for selling the naming rights and actively communicating those plans are two different things, which the County Board is getting a real-time lesson in this week
But the question of money (and cost) is…interesting.
Every dog - and illegally parked car - on the street in Cork knows that the County Board needs cash to service its debt on the redevelopment of Páirc Uí Chaoimh. As it stands, Páirc Uí Chaoimh is neither getting enough matches nor concerts to generate sufficient cash, and so naming rights are one way of making some easy money.
The Examiner reported that the SuperValu deal is worth €1 million over three years, which in the grand scheme is small change, and at what cost? (Both SuperValu and Cork County Board are currently figuring that out).
It would be interesting if it were just a case of cash, and selling the naming rights to the highest bidder. Would Cork County Board consider renaming Páirc Uí Chaoimh to Pornhub Páirc if it were worth, say, €10 million over three years? Of course, they wouldn't, for all the obvious reasons. (But what if it were rechristened Mindgeek Páirc, the parent company of Pornhub, or say, Mallpractice Páirc, the holding company of Electric, on South Mall? Would they be more palatable? What’s in a name?)
On the question of naming and renaming, while Croke Park is in a different financial position given the number of games, concerts, and conferences it holds, you can be certain that Croke Park will never be renamed. The price there is set at priceless.
So what’s a County Board in Cork to do?
A few things.
Appeal to their contacts and connections at Musgrave’s - owners of SuperValu, Centra, and Mace - that they should just pony up the money anyway, in exchange for… love and gratitude and all the wonderful things that SuperValu stands for when it talks about community, sustainability, and legacy. The Cork-based company made pretax profits of €116 million in 2022. €1 million, if that’s the figure involved in the naming rights, is a drop in the ocean there, and while they won’t get their name on the stadium, they can bask in the glow of being associated with the greatest stadium in Cork, without being derided for canceling the legacy of Pádraig Ó Caoimh and made meme fun of.
Do better. A lot better. Reading through the business plan, the brains from the County Board who put it together completely failed to see local competition for staging events such as concerts. The only competition it boldly states is from Dublin. Meanwhile, Musgrave Park and Live at The Marquee both pull in thousands of punters every summer. There’s a huge appetite for matches such as the South Africa vs Munster game that took place in 2022. Likewise, the County Board clearly needs to do a lot more heavy lifting to pull in more big-ticket concerts. Concentrate on the hard work.
Work on accessibility. Shout loud when and where you are running park-and-ride services for big games, concerts, and even wedding fairs. Work with the City Council and An Gardaí to penalise (and educate) drivers who make life a pain for residents around the stadium and abandon cars at will. Also, put in a thousand bike parking racks. I cycled down last summer with my son for the drawn hurling game against Tipperary (what a match, what a stadium, what an atmosphere, why did the “prawn sandwich” lad next to me leave with five minutes to go?) I locked my bike next to a pole. It was grand, but you can do better.
In short add value, just maybe not SuperValu.
(Shout out to the best commercial tie-up I heard so far: Costcutters Páirc which would neatly encapsulate the County Board’s predicaments. Also, to The Irish Examiner who broke two big Cork stories in the space of a few days. Great journalism, and they deserve credit, now just get better at recognising that other publications also break news in Cork, and that’s OK too.)
From the T+D archive:
3 Cork Munster hurling matches on GAAGO is not what Cork supporters should be getting worked up about
Though it likes to claim otherwise, at senior intercounty level, the GAA is a business with one modus operandi: to make profit. This week’s announcement and subsequent outrage and media coverage surrounding next year’s …
Given how all this has come to pass, it seems only fitting that we rename it Pairc Proinsias Ó Murchú.
This thing drove people totally insane, I can’t quite believe it. The family have no comment to make on the matter. Their legacy is more than a stadium I am lead to believe. The Examiner and a few others had a field day with this given the media ban from the meeting and that was fun to watch!