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SuperValu Páirc has a ring to it all right, the ring of desperation in Cork GAA

Páirc Uí Chaoimh debt of more than €30m leaves county board in no position to turn down naming rights sponsorship

Cork county board will meet on Tuesday night to discuss the renaming of Páirc Uí Chaoimh to SuperValu Páirc. Photograph: Evan Treacy/Inpho
Cork county board will meet on Tuesday night to discuss the renaming of Páirc Uí Chaoimh to SuperValu Páirc. Photograph: Evan Treacy/Inpho
Denis Walsh's picture
Denis Walsh
Tue Jan 16 2024 - 12:45

The sale of naming rights for Páirc Uí Chaoimh will be announced and discussed at a Cork county board meeting on Tuesday night. Even from this distance the outrage is easy to lip read: part of Cork GAA’s identity flogged to the highest bidder; the desecration of a name. Shame.

Even for those who understand the commercial imperatives, and accept that the stadium has become a yoke around the neck of Cork GAA, the proposed new name will be hard to swallow. As reported by the Irish Examiner yesterday, Páirc Uí Chaoimh will be rebranded as SuperValu Páirc, in a clunky, bilingual, mash-up.

The sale of naming rights for county grounds in the GAA has become increasingly common in recent years, but the key difference everywhere else was that the sponsor’s name was a prefix to the existing name. Strip away the packaging and nothing was lost.

If that was a sticking point in these negotiations the stadium board was hardly in a strong bargaining position. At the Cork GAA convention last month it was revealed that the debt on the stadium was still in excess of €30 million. It was also reported that Páirc Uí Chaoimh had made “a comprehensive loss of €2.688 million” for 2023.

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Its poor trading position for last year is not hard to decipher. The stadium failed to host a concert and failed to attract a GAA fixture of any real significance outside of Cork’s home games. The original business model for the redeveloped Páirc Uí Chaoimh leant heavily on projected income from both of these sources.

A moribund hurling league final attracted about 15,000 to the stadium on Easter Sunday, with reportedly widespread hostility in Kilkenny to the choice of venue. Many thousands of Kilkenny supporters stubbornly refused to travel and were outnumbered by about nine-to-one by Limerick supporters in the ground.

The calcified perception of Páirc Uí Chaoimh as a difficult venue to access is consistently harming its chances in the bartering that underpins fixture-making. They believed they had secured the Munster hurling final last summer until Clare decided they wouldn’t put their players, or their supporters, through the aggravation of travelling to Cork. An unsuccessful bid to host the All-Ireland hurling quarter-finals was also made.

In common with new stadiums everywhere, though, Páirc Uí Chaoimh must be nimble in its business dealings. Just like Croke Park, it is no longer just a GAA ground: it has a dual existence as a multipurpose entertainment venue. The Bruce Springsteen concert in May, for example, means that the Cork footballers will play their home round-robin game in Páirc Uí Rinn – either in the Sam Maguire Cup or the Tailteann Cup.

The footballers were consulted on this scheduling clash, but they were scarcely in a position to object. Páirc Uí Chaoimh simply couldn’t go two summers without a concert; and one concert is not nearly enough.

Fourteen months ago they staged the first rugby game in the ground, a sold-out, midweek fixture between Munster and a South Africa XV; next month Munster will play Crusaders from New Zealand on a Six Nations weekend, and every ticket for that game has been sold too.

The prospect of Páirc Uí Chaoimh staging Munster’s traditional St Stephen’s Day fixture against Leinster has been in a holding pattern for years but it will surely land sooner rather than later.

The Cork county board were entrenched opponents of Croke Park being opened to rugby and soccer when that debate was raging 20 years ago, but the people who led that resistance are no longer in positions of power, and the current stadium board couldn’t afford to have any truck with clapped-out objections. They’re trying to run a business.

The sale of naming rights for Páirc Uí Chaoimh has been on the agenda ever since it became clear that the stadium redevelopment would not be “debt-free” – as originally advertised. “We have taken the conscious decision [that] there will be no bank borrowing on the development of this stadium,” said the then county board secretary Frank Murphy in 2014, “even though GAA headquarters are still wondering about it.” Nobody is wondering now: the numbers killed the wonder.

It is believed that the naming rights deal will be worth about a €1 million over three years and Páirc Uí Chaoimh desperately needs every penny it can generate. Will SuperValu Páirc survive the backlash that will reach a crescendo at the county board meeting tonight? At what point will SuperValu realise that the new name is a monumental PR cock-up, torpedoing the goodwill that their sponsorship was supposed to engender?

Anyway, it won’t be called by its new name, whatever that turns out to be. In Cork, people only ever called it The Park. No change.

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