The GAA’s value to society is immense on all fronts, says English university professor

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Sifting through one of the 127 sets of GAA club accounts provided for an an ongoing study on the economic impact and social value/return of the three Gaelic games associations, a line jumped off one of the pages that the lead researcher felt compelled to investigate.

Professor Simon Shibli, head of the Sports Industry Research Centre (SIRC) at Sheffield Hallam University which has been commissioned to produce ‘Measuring the economic impact and social value of Gaelic games,’ has been involved in the compilation of quite a few similar pieces of research.

But seeing €3,650 ‘funeral expenses’ in the expenditure column of a club whose figures he was analysing for the bigger picture required further scoping.

“It completely blew my mind,” said Professor Shibli. “I thought to myself ‘I’ve got to find out more about this.”

What came back, he says now, was a “unique insight” into what he was dealing with that’s “not your average golf, rugby or soccer club which is typically what I have dealt with. This, to me, is something quite different.”

 

​It turns out that a young member of the club died tragically on holidays and the family connection with to the club was so strong that a contribution was made. “Nobody would know about that until a nerd like me comes along looks in their accounts and asks why are they paying for a funeral. That to me is like a litmus tests that says ‘it’s more than just a club’.”

 

 

The research – also being conducted in partnership with the University of Ulster (chiefly through Dr Paul Donnelly, the former Antrim hurler and current Down camogie manager) and Manchester Metropolitan University – is well under way.

By autumn they expect to have a figure calculating the overall value of GAA, LGFA and Camogie Association activity to society. And as the three associations look to a 2027 deadline to become one, an integration that will require significant State investment to make it work equitably, it’s important to be armed with knowledge of your value and reach.

The work involves painstaking analysis of club, county, provincial and central accounts to establish an economic value. But a more subjective analysis will seek to value social return on investment (SROI). For every euro of input, what’s the output in terms of physical and mental well being.

Professor Simon Shibli

Where do you start with something like that? How far do you go with it?

When Sheffield Hallam produced ‘Social Return on Investment of Sport and Physical Activity in England’, the analysis concluded that English sport’s value was €71.61bn – 3.28 times more than every pound invested – while the consumer spend was over €25bn, of which some €13bn was community-related. Some 21pc was gambling-related.

 

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Closer to home, a similar study in 2018 estimated that the sport spend in Ireland was €3.3bn ,while the health impact was close to €500m.

When the Na Fianna club in Dublin commissioned Whitebarn Consulting to come up with figures around social value, they found that for every euro invested, the social return was multiplied by 15. Overall, Na Fianna was estimated to be worth €50m to society.

Professor Shibli feels the GAA’s unique amateur/volunteer-led ethos is always more likely to produce much higher outcomes. “The thing I would say about Na Fianna report is that the return on investment multiple was a lot higher than we conventionally see,” he said.

“The UK model has a return on investment of 4:1, a lot of the Irish studies are showing between 12:1 and 19:1.

“That’s not to say that they are over-inflated. It’s to say that there is clearly something unique about Irish sport and particularly Gaelic games. It is a professionalised sport in a way that it is run and administered but an amateur sport in the way that it is played and administered locally.

 

“So there is a lot of unrecognised volunteer effort that goes into this process which may make the multiples on return on investment a lot higher because you are not paying out so much in wages.”

He cites the example of the GAA’s €138m turnover at central level for 2022. “There are 152 staff, so each member of staff is effectively generating €900,000.

“We know that isn’t the case because the wages don’t reflect the massive amount of volunteer effort that goes into the organisation to enable that income to be realised.

“If an average member of staff in the construction industry was responsible for €100,000 of income you would be saying that’s a decent business. So when you get nine times that, you know there is something unusual about it.”

But getting to grips with the number of employees is a challenge and Professor Shibli admits that when you have looked at as many of these accounts as he has, “you know where these sums are hidden. Or not hidden!”

 

To establish economic impact figures the research team will use what are termed ‘satellite’ accounts that will extract sports-related spend hidden away in the national accounts of other industries. Professor Shibli uses the analogy of an orb in a universe.

“Looking at the GAA accounts of clubs and counties, they spend an awful lot of money on O’Neills, whether equipment or clothing,” he said.

“All of that would appear in the clothing/textile industry, so what a satellite account does is look at all of the consumption that is related to sport, even if it is in other industries, and it pulls that into one place.

“So it will make the industries from which this expenditure has come from smaller and it will make sport bigger, enabling you to look at sport in a more rounded way.”

Establishing the social value and return is, according to Professor Shibli, a “murky field” but the existence of the Social Value International network sets standards of verification and peer review that the industry abides by.

 

“If we take coronary heart disease (CHD) for example, we know that people who are physically active have a lower risk of CHD than those who are not. We can then calculate, how many people are involved in GAA, how many meet the physical activity threshold that we need.

“Because of their physical activity, their risk is lower so we can compute how many cases of CHD would be averted and then, from other data sources, health studies, we know how much it costs to treat somebody with CHD or a back problem.

“(The equation is) the number of cases averted multiplied by the notional cost of treating that condition equals the social value,” he said.

“We look at eight or nine conditions for which there is evidence that being physically active reduces the risk and for which there is cost data.”

Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are a further measurement used for time spent in good health.

 

For mental benefits there is a subjectivity, says Professor Shibli, that as a result of being physically active, being part of a club and taking part in sport, your life satisfaction tends to be higher than people that don’t.

“There is something that has just come on the scene called a WELLBY, a well-being measurement. If the average person’s life satisfaction is seven and for people who take part in Gaelic games it’s eight, that one point difference probably has a WELLBY value of £3,500.

“It’s that intrinsic value of being involved in a sport in doing something meaningful and getting something from it that improves your life quality.”

Another measurement values how worthwhile a person considers their life to be.

“We find that people who volunteer have higher worthwhileness scores than people who don’t,” said Professor Shibli.

 

It would be “bordering on vulgar,” he says, to place a monetary value on other elements of Gaelic games.

“Things like Scór, Ghaeltacht areas, language, all things we haven’t seen in other sports and we think these are of value but it would probably be inappropriate to put a monetary value on it.

“We had a similar experience in New Zealand, trying to do social value for the Maori people and there are some things which are sacred to them and important which enhance their lives which they like to have reported qualitatively but they wouldn’t want you to put a value on it.

“There is a brilliant line from a now retired academic, Barry Houlihan from Loughborough University, about Gaelic games being ‘woven into the fabric of Irish society’. You couldn’t say that about rugby or football in the UK,” he concluded