Chance to cash in on All-Ireland involvement cannot be overlooked

To cash in and make a buck off the fervour and final fever alive in both counties, most especially alive on Leeside.

Breakfasts, brunches, dinners, and every sort of a preview event you can think of has been cooked up and priced up.

Last Wednesday week, Cork GAA announced a hurling final preview event, which took place on Wednesday evening gone, where a table of 10 set you back €3,000. 

That was the “full-forward” option, with the “half-forward” tables carrying a €2,500 price tag.

The €300-a-seat preview evening included a drinks reception sponsored by Heineken, a four-course meal, and a slew of household names looking ahead to the big game, including Jimmy Barry-Murphy.

Such was the demand for the event, Cork added a preview breakfast for this morning, Thursday. A table here came at a cost of €2,500. 

Cork All-Ireland winners Tomás Mulcahy and Dónal Óg Cusack, along with Tipperary’s two-time All-Ireland winning manager Liam Sheedy, were the special guests.

While the advertisement for the morning event stated that six final tickets came as part of the €2,500 table-of-10 package, there was no such mention of tickets in the initial promo for the evening gig. 

Subsequent queries, however, confirmed that the precious match tickets were included in the hefty wedge handed over for the dinner package.

Clare are holding two similar events today and tomorrow Friday. There’s a preview breakfast at the Dromoland Inn this morning Thursday and a preview brunch at the Croke Park Hotel on Friday at 11am.

Unlike Cork who went with full table pricing, with a view to tapping into the corporate sector, tickets to the Clare events are being sold individually.

Or rather, were being sold individually. Both events quickly achieved sell-out status. They quickly sold out because the €250 asking price at Dromoland and €300 entry free into the Croke Park Hotel brunch includes a coveted All-Ireland final ticket.

One argument against this monetising of final involvement is that the tickets being used to push and sell these events could otherwise be given to clubs who are failing desperately to meet demand for Sunday’s game.

Over the weekend, one Cork club had 375 members enter their drawing of 71 All-Ireland final tickets. That’s over 300 people in a single club left empty-handed. 

And while it is impossible to satisfy the unprecedented levels of interest for this Cork-Clare final, club members whose names are not pulled out can rightfully look on in vexation at the syphoning off of tickets for these preview events and the hefty price tag put on them.

The post-match banquets are another avenue to bolster coffers. 

Cork are charging €175 into theirs at the Clayton Hotel, whereas Clare are having an after-party event, separate to the main function at the InterContinental Hotel, for which tickets cost €30.

Against all that, there is the bottom line reality that All-Ireland final involvement does not come cheap.

Clare’s team expenditure for 2023 came in at €1.373m, up 25% on the previous year. In Cork, team spending reached €1.995m, a jump from €1.614m in 2022.

Cork can expect their 2024 total to soar past the €2m mark for the first time, while Clare will break the €1.5m barrier.

Beyond ever-increasing team costs, the debt on Páirc Uí Chaoimh that Cork must service stood at over €30m at the end of last year. 

There’s also the county’s cash flow issues which CEO Kevin O’Donovan described as “stark” at last year’s convention.

So while the prices being put on these various preview events venture close to eye-watering status and are hard justified, those charged with balancing the ledger know that a week such as this is an opportunity to spike income that they cannot afford to overlook.