Ye moaned long and hard when you were not allowed in.
1 Like
Rubby have really bought into the social element of sport and turned their games into an âeventâ rather than a match.
I have numerous friends who attend GAA games and once or twice a year some of them will go to some rubby match. The rubby match is posted on their socials as itâs seen in the same breath as EP or a concert. Itâs seen as fun and hip, none of these care about the actual game but itâs a grand day out in Dublin or Cork followed by a night out. It can be planned months in advance so youâve a hotel booked for the night out afterwards also.
GAA is none of the above social things, they donât help themselves with lack of promotion or playing games in half empty stadia either. Itâs why the Munster championship is the only GAA equivalent as it is both an event & a serious sporting competition.
There is no reason why a Railway cup type competition shouldnât fill Croke park with a bit of marketing.
6 Likes
While I would tentatively agree, you have Club action working against it as well as vitriolic animosity from rival counties, and a lack of buy in from the public due to, as you say poor marketing. This is what rugby got right. Marketing. They nailed it.
I wouldnt trust the GAAâs Communications dept to manage that. They even made a shite of the one good promotion they had going in the Guinness hurling campaign.
1 Like
The ignorance of the gaa folk at times is incredible. Irish rugby is a lot more popular than thirty years ago and youâve folk sneering at them for it.
Itâs an absolute scandal how little hurling is played in the country.
You can say rugby is an event but itâs a fairly miserable event in Thomond or ravenhill on a winters night.
There isnât much glory in it.
The gaa seem more In interested playing events like Boston thing or the all stars in Argentina than actually growing hurling which is very sad.
Rubby is played seriously in less than 20 schools and approx 80 clubs in the whole of Munster. Granted a lot of this is due to the nature of the sport but It is not a serious participation sport compared to Hurling, Football and soccer.
Rubby is grand for a Saturday night in November when your looking for an excuse to get out to the boozer, thatâs itâs main selling point.
1 Like
I dunno who you think is turning up in pissing rain to sink pints at rugby ground in November.
Television viewership is through the roof for rugby as well.
Youâve gaa club players afraid to play in April and may because the pitches are too wet according to lads on here meanwhile rugby has proven you can grow sport and all you get is sneery comments.
Hurling is max taken seriously in 12 counties and parts of those counties have no interest.
Excellent post. Lads on here will sneer at the social media optics but the only big Grab All Association event that was unavoidable on the likes of Insta and Tiktok (can only speak to anecdotal evidence on this one) was Galway-Armagh, driven Iâd say 70% of the way by the All Ireland champs.
Rubby union has nearly everything cornered for the lucrative and vain mid-20âs to mid-40âs market. Work night out? Thereâll be pics doing the rounds from the Sportsground Dexcom Arena. Miserable wet November? Thereâll be a tsunami of pics from the Aviva where weâve efficiently beaten the Argies. Paddyâs weekend? You better believe Leah and the gang will be posting about watching it in a publican house smoking area loaded up on G&Tâs.
Rubby Union dominates the FOMO market. You might not respect the sport but theyâll still make money off ya.
5 Likes
A lot of gaa people donât want the sport to be popular. Itâs beneath them to try and grow the game.
1 Like
I was listening to some suit from Leinster on the radio a while back talking about the RDS redevelopment and how they are âadapting their offeringâ to attract younger generations who âwant to be entertainedâ and âexpect to see cheerleaders and a range of other entertainmentâ.
No different to the painful music they started playing at gaa games.
You know the point Iâm making, rubby is a grand event especially during the winter months when the GAA stops.
They know this and cash in on meaningless games at Xmas (provinces) and November (internationals) due to their marketing efforts plus the fact that many in the upper echelons of society of this country big up these events.
The knockout stages of the URC should be a serious sporting occasion but Munster canât sell out Thomond as it doesnât suit peopleâs social schedule and very few actually care about Munster v Cardiff blues.
1 Like
Thankfully GAA is too fast to play it after every score. I hated the introduction of music at the final whistle in finals and now other games in croke park. All it does is drown out the crowd noise and atmosphere.
Munster and Leinster sell lots of season tickets donât forget.
Rugby went the way the gaa has gone now but it is rowing back. A lot more free to air games. The biggest issue with rugby now is the season is too long. September in June and invariably youâve only six days to sell the tickets for the knock out fixture.
That is woeful scheduling.
I think very few really care at gaa games too. Most counties have huge bandwagons when they start winning. Rugby is no different.
1 Like
Agree rating but lads love to hit rugby with this sort of stuff.
The president of Real Madrid said heâd prefer if football was 60 minutes long because young people have such short attention spans nowadays.
That had me thinking hurling should be the ideal sport to grow because the plays are so quick.
I think rubby and GAA can easily coexist. The biggest rubby county in Ireland is selling out every hurling match they have. Every rubby man on here outside Dublin is also a GAA man
3 Likes
Rugby is more popular than it was 30 years ago but less popular than it was 20 years ago. The Heineken cup was way more popular than watever the current incarnation is. Maybe its my age but todays rugby stars are far less interesting or engaging. O Driscoll, O Gara, O Connell etc were way easier to warm to and were way bigger stars than anybody currently playing.
2 Likes
Most of that because is rugby went behind a paywall like the gaa is doing now but thankfully that is changing and itâs back on free to air a lot more.
Hurling is played nearly every single day of the week in the vast majority of counties and certainly in the counties that want to play it. I know you like to wind up, but try better.
1 Like
Rugby is a minority sport and barely tolerated and certainly not played to any great degree or number by a huge amount of the population. Its marketed very well at the âclubâ level, but thats about it really.
Argentina doesnât have a top level club competition. Their players all have to play in Europe. They had a Super Rugby franchise for a couple of years but the competition effectively collapsed. Thatâs what I mean when I say itâs in âno manâs landâ.
The Waratahsâ average attendance is around 12k. It was nearly 20k a decade ago. The competition they play in is dying, they finished bottom of it this year.
Rugby Union football in Australia only has the Cadbury Wallabies as a major selling point, and even then, outside of the World Cup and maybe the Lions once every 12 years, the public are only interested in the New Zealand games, and they donât even sell out now. 68k at last weekâs one. The more batterings the team takes, and theyâre taking a lot of batterings lately, the more the dagger is twisted in the heart of the sport.
The Swans crowd as far as I can see is mainly a middle class one drawn from the Eastern suburbs and relatively near inner northern and western suburbs (though the Swans as an entity is attractive to the whole of Sydney). Thatâs the rugby union heartland. Going to the SCG to see the Swans is very attractive for families or as a precursor to a night out. Sydney is producing its own AFL players now and my understanding is Aussie Rules has made good inroads into the traditional schools which produced rugby union players. The Swans team tomorrow has a proper core of star players from around the Sydney/near Sydney area. Heeney, Gulden, Blakey, Mills (even if heâs out, heâs the club captain). AFL is very attractive to the corporate set. The Swans drew an average home attendance of 39k this year and it would be bigger if the SCG held more.
NRL will probably always be king in Sydney especially Western Sydney where the GWS Giants will have a much harder time making a success of themselves as club. But for all NRLâs popularity the attendances it attracts on a weekly basis are poor. 50k was the largest crowd it attracted during the home and away season this year and that was in Brisbane. Games at the Sydney Football Stadium or the Olympic Stadium, even finals usually have sparse attendances and are very poor spectacles. Outside of State Of Origin and the Grand Final NRL it doesnât have many âeventsâ. Itâs strength is the old school shithole grounds like Brookvale Oval and Leichardt Oval. But overall it has an image problem as being a bogan sport.
The AFL is Australiaâs equivalent of the Premier League or the NFL, itâs the dominant sports league in Australia. Itâs national and it packs the crowds in everywhere. You just donât get 70k-90k going to NRL home and away games on a regular basis like you do in AFL. Crowds create interest, they create spectacle and make children want to play the sport.
I think NRL is even more ingrained in Queensland than it is in New South Wales but thereâs a similar dynamic going on with AFL in Brisbane too. The Lions are a very attractive proposition across the board in terms of potential spectators, sponsors and getting children into the sport, everything.
If you donât have that major professional league in your country - and worse if you have rival major professional leagues in other sports - and rugby union football in Australia has both of these problems - you will always have a problem, because you donât have anything to bridge the interest gap and the player production gap to the international game where the main interest is.
2 Likes