GAAGO: Hurling suffers when RTÉ and GAA put the best matches behind a paywall

Anybody who has been tuning in to Dónal Óg Cusack’s captivating Hurling Nation broadcasts on Morning Ireland every Friday won’t have been surprised by his passionate contribution to The Sunday Game’s evening show at the weekend.

Cusack’s weekly radio pronouncements on the hurling championship stray far beyond the salt and pepper of match previews, diving headlong into issues such as the GAA’s rat-a-tat scheduling of the games and other perceived offences against the promotion of hurling. In a short piece, every second word is a bullet.

Even on Morning Ireland, hurling gets the red-eye slot at 7.35am, allowing everybody an extra hour to wake up in time for the football previews. The bite-size irony of that scheduling hierarchy won’t be lost on Cusack either.

On Sunday night Cusack addressed the scheduling abomination that has seen the three best hurling games of the year so far appearing on GAAGO – the streaming service co-owned by the GAA and RTÉ – rather than free-to-air on RTÉ’s terrestrial channels. Starting with the hectic, high-scoring Clare versus Tipperary game in Ennis on the opening weekend of the hurling championship, the sequence carried on to the epic Clare-Limerick game in the Gaelic Grounds six days later, and the bewitching Cork-Tipperary game in Páirc Uí Chaoimh on Saturday night.

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Over the years, the Munster hurling championship has been the early season ratings winner for the GAA’s broadcast partners, but mostly RTÉ. Before they left the pitch, it was known to be a source of frustration to Sky Sports that they had so little access to Munster championship matches, and instead were fed a diet of Saturday evening games in Leinster. Even in a good year, those games were hit-and-miss.

According to an RTÉ source, the national broadcaster would expect to attract between 300,000 and 400,000 for a Sunday afternoon Munster championship match; in the case of last summer’s breathtaking Munster final between Clare and Limerick, the audience peaked at 695,000 and averaged out at half a million viewers. It was the only GAA game before July that came close to RTÉ’s audience for the Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid.

So, knowing from years of audience data that these games are hugely attractive to their viewers, RTÉ and the GAA decided to put three of them, not just behind a pay wall, but on a streaming service – adding another layer of complexity and obstruction to the GAA’s older audience, while also deterring a section of the GAA audience who will watch a game if its handy and put in front of them. Every sport needs the floating viewer too.

On Sunday night Cusack made the perfectly reasonable suggestion that RTÉ and the GAA were using these games as leverage for what is a new, expanded phase in GAAGO’s existence. That, essentially, this was a commercial decision: people will be so keen to watch these matches that they will be prepared to pay for it.

The GAA needs whatever income it can generate from broadcast rights in a shallow marketplace. It also needs to embrace streaming as a means of keeping pace with the viewing behaviours of a changing audience. But what cannot be lost is balance.

As a public service broadcaster, it is RTÉ’s duty to deliver the most attractive, most popular, most newsworthy sports events to its viewers as often as it can. On the weekend just gone, RTÉ’s prime time Sunday afternoon slot for Gaelic games was devoted to a pair of provincial football finals that everybody knew were going to be one-sided and insufferably dull.

The provincial football championships are heading towards extinction, or some twilight, palliative existence that will lead to their extinction. The pitiful crowds that turned up at MacHale Park (11,867) and the Gaelic Grounds (12,499) reflected not just the diminished status of the provincial football championships in the imagination of the GAA public (for contrast, there were 36,765 in Páirc Uí Chaoimh on Saturday), but also the absence of mystery about the outcomes. And yet, this is what the Sunday afternoon GAA viewer was asked to consume. The viewing numbers will be interesting.

The days when provincial football finals should have a ring-fenced status in RTÉ’s schedule of live broadcasts is long gone. It is not RTÉ’s role to prop up clapped out competitions in the GAA calendar just because the GAA hasn’t had the collective bottle to bury them yet.

Each of these games should be judged by normal and reasonable editorial values. Why must RTÉ commit to them months in advance? On the schedule that was published at the beginning of April, for example, they have adopted a wait-and-see approach to the final round of hurling round robin games, and won’t make a judgment until it is clear which games are the most consequential. That is the only sensible way for a media organisation to conduct its business.

Paywalls are part of the modern landscape – The Irish Times itself has its own version in its metered payment model – and it isn’t realistic to expect that all media be free. Streaming services played an invaluable role in bringing matches into people’s homes during the pandemic. The pleasing spin-off is that any number of games are available on various streaming services up and down the country now. In the early weeks of the season GAAGO has provided this service too, showing games that were strictly of niche interest.

To make the service a commercial success they will need reasonable access to attractive games too, and that’s clearly where the Munster championship has entered the calculations of RTÉ and the GAA. In recent weeks though, they got the balance wrong.

In every large organisation there are sectional interests. In the GAA, nobody loves hurling and football equally. There will always be a degree of crossover curiosity and fondness, but no matter how great your passion for the GAA, you will always prefer one game over another.

In the early weeks of this season, hurling has been screwed in the TV scheduling. For the GAA and RTÉ and a devoted audience, that amounts to a careless loss.