There was a lot of talk online this week as Sky Sports announced that they would no longer be licensing partners with the GAA after a successful nine years between both Sky Sports and the GAA.
A lot of people in Ireland are delighted with this news as you can imagine, because our national games were behind a pay per wall and you had to pay in order to view some of the games. While you can understand why people were upset with this, a lot of people over looked the benefits Sky Sports brought to the GAA.
Sky Sports brought the GAA to a whole new audience further a field to people that would never watch Gaelic Games. Also look what Sky Sports has done for Darts, Darts is massive now and it’s largely due to the money and marketing powers of the English company.
Is this an opportunity lost for the GAA? Its defiantly money lost, you would also have to wonder will RTE, TG4 & the BBC do half as good a job as Sky Sports did when covering the games.. Who do you fancy for the All-Ireland next year in both hurling and Gaelic football, Gaelic betting have some good odds..
Former Dublin footballer Paul Flynn was talking on Second Captains this week and was sharing his opinion on the whole scenario.
“I think this is a big mess. I think it’s a missed opportunity.
What probably transpired here, without knowing, is that Sky may have had a vision, may have wanted to expand and grow their relationship, with that their coverage and the amount of games they were showing. Maybe it wasn’t met with the same vision.
I feel like this has been coming for a while with the GAA, in relation to reining in inter-county and trying to pull things back to the roots. Maybe this is another step in it.
My initial gut feeling when I seen Sky come out with their press release was that this was a negative for the game overall…
I would have sat at the table a lot for these discussions when I was in the GPA. I just seen the sentiment shift in the views of the GAA that inter-county was a cost centre that was spiralling out of control, that’s the way it was phrased…
Interesting times ahead at the GAA, time will tell whether this was a good move or not..