Your First Impressions of Ireland: For our first blog post in Ireland, let’s focus first on your initial impressions of Dublin from our first day in town. What caught your attention during this first day in Ireland and in the city?
The weather difference between Pittsburgh and Dublin was something I noticed right away. I also noticed that while the people are extremely friendly in Dublin, they can be difficult to understand at times. Everyone I have met so far has been so accommodating and informative, even the person who had to deal with me when I locked myself out of my room during the first ten minutes of the trip. It’s also amazing how green everything is in Dublin and it makes me even more excited to see the Cliffs of Moher in a few days.
Croke Park and The Business of Sports: In addition to your first experience with Ireland and Dublin, we need to prepare for tomorrow’s visit to Croke Park Stadium, which has seating capacity for nearly 83,000 fans. The park is the home of Ireland’s largest sporting and cultural organization, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and each September hosts the GAA All-Ireland Football and Hurling Championship Finals. The park’s website https://crokepark.ie has several interesting articles on commercial opportunities associated with the stadium, such as corporate sponsorships, along with articles on some of the specific target market segments and even some material on how the park is connected to matters of environmental sustainability.
In preparation for your site visit to Croke Park for a behind-the-scenes tour, think back to our Pittsburgh site visit with Pitt Athletics, and how Pitt Athletics is a multi-million dollar business due to a combination of ticket sales, TV revenue, merchandising and licensing and other revenue streams. Croke Park likely faces similar types of commercial opportunities and challenges. Based on your quick review of the Croke Park website, identify one commercial opportunity and one commercial challenge.
One commercial opportunity for the Croke Stadium is their ability to hold a variety of events from concerts to sporting events. This allows them to bring in more revenue during the off seasons of their more popular sports games. One commercial challenge for the Croke Stadium is their lack of available space for new sponsors. They prioritize their most impressive sponsors by giving them “high visibility spaces” throughout the stadium, which doesn’t leave much room for new companies looking to advertise in the Croke Stadium and while their revenue is high right now, they could be missing out on future valuable opportunities.
A Question For The Site Visit: Finally, acting as members of consulting teams that might choose to write a group paper about the commercial opportunities and challenges connected to Croke Park, what specific questions do you have about the business model for Croke Park that relate to our course material (Triple Bottom Line and sustainability, market segmentation, maximization versus shared value, etc.)? Give us a specific question for tomorrow’s visit.
I’m assuming the people in charge of Croke Stadium favor maximization over shared value because they are trying to make the most money with the space that they have. Therefore, how could Croke Stadium do more in terms of shared value and what have they done in the past related to this business model? How do they connect to the surrounding community and encourage them to come to the stadium for events other than sports games?