Neil Naughton: ‘The game is about boosting that soft power we have in Irish America’

For November, it is a mild Saturday evening 10 miles north of Chicago at Ryan Field, home of the Northwestern University Wildcats American football team. Lest anyone forgets whose turf this is, the stadium announcer repeatedly blasts the sound of a big cat growling.

The Wildcats’ opponents, the Iowa Hawkeyes, don’t seem too intimidated. Much of the 40,000 crowd is in high spirits anyway after the festivities of the tailgate beer and barbecue-fest that took place all afternoon in the car parks.

A smattering of green is visible amid the sea of Wildcats purple and Hawkeyes yellow and black. The cheerleaders wave green pom poms; an Irish Tricolour is carried onto the pitch at the start alongside the US stars and stripes; fans wave foam shamrocks. Meanwhile, a group of Irish tourism officials and business people gathers on the side of the pitch, waiting to walk on to greet the crowd.

Among them is Neil Naughton, scion of the family dynasty that runs heating and electrical giant Glen Dimplex.

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He is co-chairman of the Aer Lingus College Football Classic series, which aims to bring US college football’s “pomp and pageantry”, as Naughton calls it, to Dublin once a year for the next five years. Some of the biggest games are estimated by Grant Thornton, a series sponsor, to be worth up to €147 million to the Irish economy. Ireland’s battered tourism sector needs the fillip.

Naughton and the delegation, including Minister for Sport Jack Chambers, eventually take to the Ryan Field pitch at the end of the first quarter. The growling feline soundtrack is replaced by the stirring tones of the Dropkick Murphys, the Celtic punk band made famous in the film, The Departed.

The crowd bounces as Naughton and the delegation turn to the cameras to urge Wildcats fans to visit Dublin for the series opener next August versus Nebraska Cornhuskers.

The big fixture is in August 2023, when Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish take on Navy at the Aviva Stadium, a game that was supposed to travel here in 2020 but was scuppered by the pandemic. Close to 40,000 Americans visited the last time a Notre Dame fixture was held in Dublin, in 2012, helping to drag Irish tourism back to its feet after the financial crash.

Along with former Aer Lingus chief executive Stephen Kavanagh, Naughton leads the committee charged with repeating that success from 2022 onwards.

Corporate cornucopia

The eldest son of Martin Naughton, Glen Dimplex’s billionaire founder, he sees the series as an opportunity to nourish the social and business connections between the US and Ireland. A cornucopia of corporate events is planned around each game. Many will be organised by Fire restaurateur Padraic O’Kane, a director of series promoter Irish American Events, and a long time event arranger for the Naughton family.

“The game is the excuse,” says Naughton earlier in the day at his Chicago hotel prior to the Wildcats fixture. “The series is more about celebrating the relationship between the two countries and getting Americans to engage in Ireland socially, culturally, academically and in business. It’s about boosting that soft power that we have in Irish America. It really does exist.”

His father previously helped to organise US college football fixtures here with the late Don Keough, the former top Coca-Cola executive and Naughton family friend who died in 2015. The two men financially underwrote the 2012 Notre Dame game. In the end it was a financial and sporting success, as US visitors filled the Aviva and the whole city.

The mood was soured a little, however, by a legal dispute between Navy and the Irish American Football Association, the local group that sanctions the sport here.

The GAA later organised a Croke Park Classic game in 2014 between Penn State and the University of Central Florida, before the first Aer Lingus Classic was held at the Aviva in 2016, between Georgia Tech and Boston College. There was a poignancy to that event for Naughton, as Keough didn’t live to see it.

“He [Keough] was such a good buddy of my dad. Don was always worried that Americans didn’t travel enough internationally, and that this would limit their horizons and they’d fall behind internationally. He wanted to get his compatriots to see the world, and he thought the most efficient way was to get them to follow their college football team,” says Naughton.

“Meanwhile, Dad knew that if Americans came over here and saw how familiar we are, how easy and pro business we are, in the future when they wanted to invest, the first place they’d think of is Ireland.”

The gregarious Naughton, who is president of his philanthropist father’s company, seems to wage a personal campaign to boost Irish America’s social bonds in the days either side of the Wildcats-Hawkeyes game. At every turn, he is socialising, pressing flesh and promoting the series.

Diplomats and officials

He attends a function the night before the game at the home of Aon insurance founder Pat Ryan, whose name adorns Northwestern’s stadium. Ryan, estimated to be worth almost $8 billion by Forbes, also owns a stake in the Chicago Bears NFL team.

Naughton brings Jack Chambers, local Irish diplomats and officials from Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Ireland to the Ryan dinner, along with the series sponsors.

“Pat was asked at his dinner about how he juggles his support of college football with his ownership of the Bears. He said the difference is that Northwestern owns you,” says Naughton.

Earlier on Friday, he leads a dawn trip two hours south to Notre Dame, to announce the 2023 game against Navy. His family has close links to the university and is a major donor – Naughton is a member of the advisory board member of Notre Dame’s Mendoza Business School. Jack Swarbrick, Notre Dame’s famed athletics director, describes the Naughton family as the “bridge” between the US and Irish interests in the series.

Hours later, Naughton returns to Illinois for a tour of Northwestern’s new $280 million athletics department and to meet Wildcats coach Pat Fitzgerald, whose family roots are in Nurney in Kildare. Shortly afterwards, he pops up at a Northwestern donors’ event prior to a Wildcats volleyball match, before skipping out to the Ryan dinner.

Next morning on game day, Naughton is back at Northwestern, meeting business figures such as Tom Meagher, an executive with $60 billion hedge fund manager GCM Grosvenor. The schedule is relentless. Yet, each time, Naughton snaps into sales mode, gliding seamlessly through rooms of dignitaries to promote the Dublin series. He clearly enjoys mixing business with pleasure.

“When Americans hear your accent in a meeting, you’ll get a smile. They see us as non-confrontational – we can relax and have a good time,” he says.

Is that how you like to do business for Glen Dimplex too?

“It is what I do. This is what I have struggled without and missed the last 18 months. I hated doing business over Zoom. It’s not the meetings that I truly get. It’s the going out for dinner that night, the chat. It’s being in the market, walking around the stores talking to the managers: what’s selling, why?”

Naughton grew up in Dundalk, near the headquarters of his father’s cross-Border business empire, and attended school at Castleknock College in Dublin. He lives in a Georgian estate in Co Meath, which he bought almost 20 years ago for €2.4 million from the aviation executive, Domhnal Slattery.

His younger brother, Fergal Naughton, is executive chairman of Glen Dimplex, while their sister, Fiona Naughton, is also on the board.

Cloud of secrecy

He studied economics at University College Dublin, before joining the family business in 1991. He ran operations in Europe and Canada, before ascending to deputy chairman and, earlier this year, company president as his father stepped away from its operations in recent years. The family business is, for the first time, run by an outside chief executive, the former Coillte boss Fergal Leamy.

Glen Dimplex is most closely associated with manufacturing heaters and radiators but it also owns brands such as Morphy Richards appliances and Belling cookers. Founded by Martin Naughton in the 1970s, it employs about 8,000 staff globally.

The Naughtons are notoriously secretive about the inner workings of the company, but it has revenues of at least €1.5 billion.

“We don’t have external shareholders that we have to keep informed, so we do like to keep it private,” says Naughton.

In his role as president, he is embedded on the commercial side of the business, preferring to travel the world meeting Glen Dimplex’s customers. His brother Fergal, he says, is more focused on the operational side. “We have different skillsets,” Naughton has said previously.

As a company involved in the heating and electric sectors, Glen Dimplex’s future is inextricably linked to the issue of climate change. Naughton is an advocate for the role that could be played by nuclear power to decarbonise the world. In what sounds like a throwback to the future, he also believes storage heaters will come to play a greater role in people’s lives.

But, I suggest to him, nobody on Earth knows how to work a storage heater. Ask anyone who has ever lived in a flat. They’re impossible. Naughton laughs and nods his head in reluctant acknowledgment.

“It used to be that way. But we have smart storage heaters now. These are products that can talk to the grid. Anyone can work them.”

Did carrying one of the best-known names in Irish business bring pressure as he ascended through his career? Was it tough to be a younger Naughton?

“I never feel any pressure from it,” he says, swigging from his Diet Coke. “I’m proud of my parents’ legacy. So I suppose you do want to live up to that. Business has always been there in our family. When we went on holidays, we’d normally find out who the local customer was and spend some time with them. My dad spent a lot of time with his customers and I like to do that too. I have an awful lot of respect for what he has done.”

About six weeks ago, Naughton interviewed his father onstage at an event in the Round Room in the Mansion House, attended by luminaries of Irish business and held under the Chatham House Rule – which holds that nobody can repeat who said what. The main speaker was Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe, who addressed the gilded audience in the run-up to Ireland’s acquiescence to an international deal on corporate tax.

What did he say?

“I can’t break the Chatham House Rule.”

CEOs Club

Naughton says it was styled as an Irish version of the renowned “CEOs Club”. He hopes to expand upon the formula and use it as a vehicle to promote business and trade around the Aer Lingus Classic series.

“It would be paid for by the event sponsors of the football. We would like to do a few events with Irish CEOs or senior executives in a room together, under the Chatham House Rule, with an interesting speaker. Then, before each game, you’d have a lunch for 500, half from Ireland, half from US.

“You would try to split it between visiting teams, depending on who has the bigger crowds, but something like 50/50 or so. Then you’d have tables of lawyers, tables of medics, tables of whatever . . . Put them together and see what happens. You make the connections and let them take it from there.”

The State is providing financial backing for the series through the two tourism agencies and also Dublin City Council. It is believed the Government, through the agencies, funded a payment of close to $5 million to get Northwestern, as the home team, to move its game to Dublin next year.

“You’ve got to make them whole on the business side.”

Naughton acknowledges that the Northwestern versus Nebraska game next year will be a harder sell than the Notre Dame game. Who knows how many fans will travel as the world comes out of the pandemic, and neither team has the inextricable local links of the Fighting Irish.

Naughton implores the Irish business community to get behind it. He is in talks with US multinationals in Ireland to see if they will provide tickets to their staff as incentives. There are also rumours that wealthy sponsors could pay for tickets to thank local workers for their efforts in the pandemic.

Naughton also wants corporates to get involved in the hospitality events around each game.

“That’s what going to make this thing a success. It will make the business lunches more beneficial to both sides: the more diverse Irish-located businesses that are behind it, the better. The CEOs Club is the best way to engage with us. But we could also talk with businesses to ask what might work with them.”

Naughton says he has no commercial interest in the Aer Lingus Classic series, and the family will provide financial backing as required.

“I try to make sure that these games don’t cost me too much, so that’s why I want other businesses involved,” he jokes. “But we will do what is expected of us. We’re not going out and asking corporate Ireland to do things we aren’t expected to do ourselves. We think this series is just what the country needs.”