Anonymous1 wrote: ↑Sun Oct 19, 2025 7:49 pm
One wonders if in taking TG4’s thirty pieces of silver, they’ve actually wound up losing more than they gained.
If you chose not to televise the game, you could’ve held it at 3 or 3:30, held a game before it and the weather wouldn’t have been as bad which would’ve boosted the attendance by a thousand or two.
It felt like a damp squib with the 1pm start and no curtain raiser. Being in the car on the way home by 2:30 doesn’t feel like a county final day at all.
I'm not going to get into the thing about comparing the Birr and Tullamore attendances, if you can't see why it was two completely different scenarios, then you are either being disingenuous or just plain blind. Attendances skyrocketed when the county final left SBP to go to Tullamore in the latter part of the 2000s as well, but that was also in no small part due to the novelty of the pairings that emerged in the aftermath of a long period of Birr dominance.
On the bit in bold above, this is a bone of contention at the moment - technically, TG4 have the rights to all club games and they're entitled to broadcast whatever ones they like. They make an ex gratia payment to counties to try and smooth things over and keep everyone happy, and while you could debate whether or not that's a win or lose arrangement for Offaly, technically they don't have to do that.
Now it is a thing that some counties have reportedly shut them out, including if rumours are to be believed, two recent All-Ireland winners who didn't want their finals broadcast. TG4 have voiced their disapproval to Croke Park, and that's whay Jarlath Burns said what he did at the recent special congress about streaming of club games.
Now by tying in sponsorship deals, I think Burns went off track, to be honest. The issue is exactly as said there - that TG4 are not welcome in certain counties, and instead he made it about the streaming companies, and sponsorship. Let's call a spade a spade, Aviva sponsor Clubber, Allianz are an official GAA sponsor, that's a problem in his opinion. I think that's selective myself. After all, nobody said boo to Dublin when Allianz sponsored the leagues and AIG sponsored Dublin GAA. If you want to get into an NFL style world where sponsorship deals are collective, you'll get your pushback from the Dublins, Corks and Kerrys of this world very fast.
In terms of the time of day, the way the weather came was just unlucky, imho. Yes, absolutely, the wet morning would have put people off but at the time when the game was being switched, it could just as easily have been dry all morning with rain rolling in at 3pm.
Finally, don't forget that Clubber have a subsidiary deal with Offaly GAA - so it wasn't a case that if the game wasn't on TG4, Offaly GAA could have got extra from Clubber. If the game wasn't on TG4, Clubber would have streamed it and Offaly wouldn't have got an extra cent. Absolutely, it wouldn't have had the same reach as TG4, but by the time you add up the amount of Clubber season ticket holders and then all the dodgy box owners who would have had access to the game as well, so it still would have made a dent in the attendance, and Offaly GAA would have got nothing.
As an aside, if you are a dodgy box owner and you use it to watch elite international sport, taking money out of the pocket of Sky/Rupert Murdoch, TNT Sport, or Jeff Bezos/Amazon, then I applaud you, and please continue to do so. If you have a dodgy box but you use it for Clubber, I would urge you to make a subscription to support a small, indigenous business that is a huge asset to the GAA landscape. Those two things are not the same.