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?
What caught my attention as I took my first steps in Ireland was the amount of nature mixed in with the development of Dublin. It seemed as we drove from the airport to college that the region had found a great balance between natural landscaping and developed city. As we ventured closer the city, it seemed that there was less nature, but still an impressive amount for how advanced Dublin is.
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.
It seems that Croke Park is set up perfectly for athletic events but can also be adapted with relative ease to be used for other events. This sets up the venue for opportunities to generate revenue in sports off seasons, and when there are no sports events happening. This is an excellent opportunity for the venue because it will produce revenue year round, but poses the challenge of keeping it staffed all the time. With a capacity of 83,000 people, staffing such a venue will be very expensive, and it would be hard to find enough people to do the job.
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.
What does Croke Park do as a community resource to give back to the community and enrich the general public?