GAA Director General Paraic Duffy warned about the dangers of TV coverage impacting upon attendances in the GAA annual report.
According to research in the US (there's always a study in the US), the biggest supporters of teams are those who attended games before the age of 10, and that if someone doesn't go to matches before the age of 20, they are unlikely to go to games after that.
As I noted in my report to last year’s Congress, high-quality TV coverage poses one of a number of threats to attendance at games, including the loss of valuable revenue and of what Americans call the ‘birth of a fan’ experience
Duffy quotes an ESPN Sports Poll which found that more than 50% of US sports fans prefer watching sport on TV to actually turning up at the game.
We may be some way from that situation in Ireland, but we have no grounds for complacency. We must the issues that discourage attendance at our games
To guard against this, he argues that encouraging young people to attend games remains a central concern for the GAA.
Elsewhere in the report, Duffy attacked the practice of releasing the wrong team to the media before matches, describing it as an "embarrassment." He also said that comments questioning the integrity of referees should lead to match bans
End-of-match hooters will come into force in 2014. Hawkeye will be retained for 2014 despite the mistake in the Limerick-Galway minor semi-final. Duffy acknowledged that this was an unfortunate incident caused by "human error" but he was keen to stress that there was no guarantee that Limerick would have won the game had the point been allowed.
