The Pitch: Underage football worth €40m, so why is it poor relation?
Defender Sean McSweeney makes a cross into the box for Castleview against Macroom.
Last weekend or next more than 150,000 schoolboys and girls play fixtures in their schoolboys/girls league seasons.
Two thirds of those players will begin a new season while one third will enter the final phases of a calendar year campaign.
Despite the incredible numbers already playing the game from U12s to U16s in competitive competitions, the SFAI is expecting “an explosion in numbers” as thousands of girls join local clubs on the back of a first ever FIFA World Cup appearance by the Irish Women’s Team.
Yet very little is known about the sector and its direct financial impact on the economy.
Let’s have a look at some of the numbers and then some of the challenges which impact on a segment of sport worth more than €40m and rising.
There are approximately 150,000 players (SFAI estimates) playing competitive underage football across the country for around 1,200 clubs.
This does not include the tens of thousands more small children who play at U10 level and lower, in development football, at a non-competitive level (where there is no emphasis on winning and no league tables to assess a team’s performance).
In the competitive leagues, there could be as many as 10,000 teams in operation in total, with some clubs having up to 20 teams on their books and smaller outfits having as few as four or five.
These clubs compete across 35 separate schoolboy league organisations throughout the country, who administer anything from 4,000 to 5,000 games each weekend, on average.
To assess the financial value of these numbers we have used analysis supported by estimates and approximates from the SFAI, Cork Schoolboys League, Irish Soccer Referees Society (ISRS) and various grassroots sources.
The Pitch estimates that players will pay approximately €7.5m in membership and registration fees for the year ahead, with prices ranging conservatively from as little as €20 to €175 – we’ve settled on an average of €50.
Before a ball is kicked, parents and guardians will fork out an astonishing €15m in kit costs for boots, shin pads, shorts and socks and other add-ons including backpacks and drinks bottles.
They will shell out another €15m in hidden costs including car and travel expenses ferrying their priceless cargo to training and to games.
Those games are nothing without referees, and match officials come with a cost, which the ISRS President Sean Slattery says ranges in price depending on travel to venues and number of games at each destination, as well as agreed fees per age.
According to the ISRS this works out at €29 for U12 games, €31 for U13 and €36 for U16 matches, averaging out at €32 per game, multiplied by 5,000 games, coming to €160k per weekend, costing up to €3.5m per year, including cup competitions.
And there is the price to be paid for insurance to cover medical and physio costs for injured players, which industry have told The Pitch, averages out at approximately €10 per player – or €1.5m in total.
The price of a senior player’s insurance is around six times higher, given the propensity of older bodies being more susceptible to a greater amount of injuries and factoring in lost wages cover.
For the purposes of this analysis we won’t consider the additional costs of infrastructure, floodlighting (and other energy costs), equipment or even the long-term economic health benefits.
So in direct costs only we evaluate the Schoolboys/girls leagues to be worth approximately €41m.
DESPITE the current turmoil with the Women’s National Team and the firing of manager Vera Pauw, the female game will grow significantly in the coming weeks, across younger non-competitive players and those who are eligible for competitive football.
The SFAI is watching this area closely and already indications are that this growth will form a boom across the game.
“We’re expecting to see an explosion in the number of girls playing, but what those numbers will be we just don’t know right now,” explained Secretary of the SFAI Anthony Phelan.
“We’ll have a much better understanding of it in four to six weeks, but I’d imagine it will be quite significant.”
The increased value that these new players bring to the game will see financial indicators increase by many millions over the seasons ahead, pushing the overall value of the game towards the €50m mark.
DESPITE the significant financial value in Ireland’s Schoolboys/girls football leagues, the game is often seen as the ‘poor relation’ of the FAI’s national league structure.
Last year the association gave League of Ireland clubs licence to raid grassroots clubs of its best talent, mid-season, as it established the U14 League of Ireland structure.
Teams which had spent the first half of the season putting league-winning runs together found themselves decimated after Christmas with the best players poached, with a number of sides folding as a result.
Chairman of the Cork Schoolboys League Peter Connolly told The Pitch that he believes that this season “there’s a small bit of common sense coming on board” where players can now only be signed by Cork City and Cobh Ramblers before the season starts.
“They’re getting their act together, there are some clubs that don’t agree with it, but they’re after sitting around a table and I think they’re doing it right now,” said the Chairman of the league which boasts 13,500 players.
A LACK of support for the grassroots underage game from the FAI is a key concern amongst many stakeholders spoken to by The Pitch.
While none wanted to go on the record, the association still allows for a wild west approach to be issued by some leagues in the running of their administrations.
The Kildare District Underage League (KDUL) for example, is also involved in the running of the LOI side Klub Kildare, which this year resulted in no team representing the county in the Kennedy Cup at schoolboy level.
Nor does the county present sides to the SFAI’s Inter League structure, where counties play on a national representative level, an alternative pathway to elite football and one which allows players to continue to also play with their clubs.
A similar conflict of interest had operated in Kerry in recent years, but that has now been rectified after grassroots and the national league outfit severed ties in the best interests of the game.
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VIRGIN MEDIA’S coverage of the World Athletics Championship has marked a remarkable period for the sport and an almost 60% surge in interest amongst audiences.
The emergence of Rhasidat Adeleke as a powerhouse of world sprinting, with more to come in Paris next year, is primarily responsible for a series of big numbers being reported by the independent broadcaster this week.
1.4 million viewers watched the athletics throughout the championships on Virgin Media Two, while an average audience of 366,400 watched Adeleke’s appearance in the 400 metres finals last week, where she finished in fourth place.
The Nike-backed runner’s growing appeal amongst younger audiences will add to the burgeoning interest of the runner amongst high level sponsors, where 37% of viewers were within that valuable 15-34 demographic.
Virgin Media also reported a growth of +59 per cent year-on-year across audience numbers throughout the competition.
NEXT week’s Horizon Irish Open at the K Club is already looking like the biggest Open tournament of all.
The Netflix-led growth of the game around the world, coupled with the timing of the Straffan showcase – coming in the week Ryder Cup Captain Luke Donald announces his team for Rome – coincides with a peak interest in the sport.
General admission ticket packages for the four days have sold out with all corporate tickets going long before the DP World Tour arrived for final preparations at the resort.
Paul Gillmon, Head of Championships with the DP World Tour said the presence of Rory McIlroy has been a considerable factor in the success of the event, even days before its start.
“There’s no hiding away from it, Rory is the statesman of the game at the moment, everything he does is hugely credible as a statesman for golf and for the DP World Tour,” he explained.
The Pitch will report live from the K Club, on the financial side of the Horizon Irish Open, next week.
