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?

My impressions of Ireland are about what I was expecting. Having been to London, the outskirts of Ireland appear very familiar, with older architecture and customs laced with modern practices and technologies. The true drab uniformity of the many flats outside Griffith probably stood out to me the most. On the plane ride in, the green fields patterned with crop fields reminded me a lot of the rural US from the air. Culturally, I was surprised to learn about the 180 the Irish have done in terms of acceptance, which I find very cool and interesting.

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.

I think one of the best business opportunities for Croke Park’s management is the GAA championships. These finals are cultural staples to the whole country and are always held at Croke. Keeping ticket sales and interest up for an event like this must require little effort for Croke. This presents a great opportunity to increase profitability of the games while maintaining their prestige and accessibility. This opportunity is available both to Croke and to many of the businesses around the park benefitting from the traffic.

One of the business challenges for Croke is embracing sustainability and a triple bottom line. On their website, there are multiple areas in which they portray their recent attempts to increase sustainability. This is a great challenge for an old stadium, as it lacks modern technology and is incredibly large, which makes systematic changes lengthy and costly.

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 would question them about market segmentation, as sports often render diehard fans who need little advertising. Having the prestige that it does, I wonder what Croke park does to advertise to an audience that is already culturally connected and how it reaches those who are not.