Sports Rights Commercialization Revisited: Sky and the GAA

On 1 April 2014 the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) announced a new 3-year broadcasting rights deal, which involved the sale of exclusive rights to certain championship matches for the first time to Sky Sports. For the week that followed a minor media storm raged around the decision. This debate was characterized – in the margins at least and depending on where you stood – as, on the one hand, the product of an hysterical over-reaction from RTÉ which deliberately generated a controversy around a run-of-the-mill decision of the sort that sporting organizations make all the time, or, on the other, an abject failure of the GAA to set out a coherent, sustainable logic to its decision to do what it had always said it would never do. As usual on these matters, the majority of people held a position somewhere in the middle, probably enjoying the spectacle until they were bored by it.