The Social Value of Gaelic games is more than a number

By John Harrington

An independent analysis of Gaelic games activity by Sheffield Hallam University’s Sport Industry Research group published today has found that the Social Value of Gaelic games is worth at least €2.87 billion to Irish society.

Before you go any further, you should read the article that’s hyperlinked in the above paragraph as it’ll give you a very helpful primer before the below deep-dive with two of the authors of the report, Professor Simon Shibli and Professor Larissa Davies.

Professor Shibli is Director of the Sport Industry Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University and Professor Davies is a Professor of Applied Sports Economics in the Faculty of Business and Law at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Sheffield Hallam University’s Sport Industry Research Group are pioneers in the economics of sport and sport’s wider social impacts. Assisted by colleagues in Manchester Metropolitan University and Ulster University, they have spent the last 13 months working on this project.

Numbers might dominate many of the headlines their report generates, but their work is as much about capturing the culture, traditions, community ethos, and emotions that generate those numbers as it is the bottom line.

The economic impact of Gaelic games that’s detailed in their research makes for interesting reading, but it’s the methodology of how they measured the Social Value of Gaelic games and how they then came to quantify it that really paints a most revealing picture.

Above all else, their work underlines the extent to which Gaelic games are about much more than just sport.

***

GAA.ie: Simon and Larissa, a considerable amount of work over a period of 13 months went into this Social Return on Investment Study into Gaelic games. I know you both have extensive experience in this field carrying out similar studies into other sports but perhaps Gaelic games are somewhat unique given the amateur and community dynamic? I wonder how the reality of what you discovered tallied with your expectations when you first began this body of research?

Simon Shibli: The thing which is most distinctive about Gaelic Games is it's more than just sport and games, and that was very apparent when we started researching the brief that the Gaelic Athletic Association exists to preserve and promote Irish identity, the language, the culture, traditions. I never really realized until I got into it, the significance of things like Scór.

I didn't realize that I could log on to the Antrim GAA website and learn some Irish. Or, indeed, that there were GAA clubs or counties who were doing things like putting out traditional Irish recipes for cooking.

Nine years ago, I was in Melbourne with Dr. Paul Donnelly from Ulster University, who is involved in this project and was an inter-county hurler, and we were randomly walking along the street in Melbourne, halfway around the world, and he just said hello to this guy who happened to be somebody he knew from St Paul's GAA club. And then one night we met a load of his mates from GAA from St Paul's on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral in Melbourne.

This kind of sense of the diaspora, the thing that united them all, was they were Gaelic games players as footballers or hurlers. That told me that we were dealing with something that is quite different to the conventional work that we do over here with something like, for example, British Swimming.

Larissa Davies: The reality that Gaelic games are so much more than sport was a revelation in terms of this research, and how it perhaps differs to other research that Simon's alluded to. Gaelic Games are far more than the sport itself, they are that integral part of Irish culture and Irish society. It was very clear quite quickly, certainly on the social value and social return on investment element of the work, that they play a central role in many communities and traditions. That creates a dimension to the social impact of the sports that we haven't necessarily seen at that scale in other sports that we've studied.

Aside from the games themselves, it was the whole way that games are integrated into communities. They form the bedrock of many communities that then generates impact far beyond the sport itself. I think perhaps we'll get into some discussion around the different elements of Gaelic Games in relation to participation and volunteering later in the discussion, but it was very evident quite quickly in this research that it was quite different from any other sports that we'd looked at previously.

GAA.ie: I can imagine it’s relatively straightforward as to how one would quantify the economic impact of sport, but I’m less sure how you quantify the Social Value of a sport. Can you talk me through the methodology?

Simon Shibli: With hard economics what we’re interested in is money that can be measured. So, if you take a micro-level, the research we did for the Ulster Senior Football Championship Final in Clones, after interviewing 600-odd people and analysing the accounts we can make a reasonable estimate that €1.5Million came into Clones and County Monaghan as a result of spectators from Donegal and Armagh visiting the area and spending money locally. And, at a macro level, can dissect from the system of national accounts that consumers spend €377Million on expenditure related to playing Gaelic Games.

Then there are things called audit trails, whereby you can verify certain things. I looked in the accounts of the GAA, the four provinces, the 32 counties and 513 clubs, and I can tell you that the GAA has a turnover of €138 million, it employs 152 people, it's got a wage bill of €8.4 million euro and so on. These are hard facts that you relate and you put a story around, and it is relatively straightforward. I trade in numbers, but what Larissa does is far more ambitious, probably far more complex, and requires her expertise to develop it a bit further.

Larissa Davies: What we do when we try and measure Social Value is we capture the wider value to individuals, communities and societies in terms of those perhaps less tangible, non-financial impacts. Things like the impact of Gaelic Games on people's health and wellbeing and life satisfaction. So, what we talked about a moment ago in relation to the networks that people have within communities.

What Social Value does is try and quantify and monetize those intangible, wider impacts. And we've got various ways that we can do that, but essentially what we're trying to do with Social Value is look at the people who are impacted by the Gaelic games, look at what changes for them as a result of taking part.

If somebody takes part in Gaelic Games, do they feel happier or more satisfied with their life as a result of that? And, if so, what's the monetary value of that? The reason we use monetary value to measure those things is to try and translate in a common currency, if you like, how important Gaelic Games are beyond those financial impacts that Simon talked about. I think, for a sport like Gaelic games, that's so important.

It's so difficult to present an account of value that really represents that wider impact if you don't look at Social Value. So, Social Value is so important in terms of measuring the impact of Gaelic games, particularly because they are amateur sports so there's a significant element of volunteering and voluntary activity that's very important that doesn't necessarily show up in in economic value.

It's really important to capture that value and the importance of the contribution of volunteers and the benefits that they gain from Gaelic Games as part of the overall assessment. The economic value is quite clearly defined and quite straightforward to understanding and represent, whereas Social Value is much broader and wider than that and captures various other elements of impact on communities and society more generally.

When you measure both economic and social value, social value is often higher, and certainly is in the case of Gaelic games. So really what that started to do is represent the wide impact that the Gaelic games have in society.

GAA.ie: What picture was painted for you, Larissa, when you went through that process?

Larissa Davies: I think we try and enter these types of research evaluations in quite an open minded way. I suspected that there would be significant value in relation to the kind of networks and social interactions and connections with Gaelic games and actually that was one of the key findings.

I talked about the different social outcomes that were measured in the study….We measured subjective wellbeing which is people's life satisfaction. We measured social capital which measures things like networks, connections, trust and so on in the community. We measured health and measured the replacement value of volunteering. And it was that outcome around Social Capital, which is the networks, connections and communities, that was the highest value of those four areas. 43 per cent of that €2.87 billion was from social capital. Whilst we kind of anticipated that might be the case from anecdotal evidence, it was still quite staggering in terms of the size of the contribution.

That was quite a key finding in relation to this work, the importance of Gaelic games to Social Capital. And I think what this study did was probably provide evidence for what people felt was the case anyway. I think prior to this study it's fair to say there's a lot of anecdotal evidence around how important Gaelic Games are to communities, but actually being able to support that with hard evidence is quite difficult. I think we've been able to do that through this this study. Gaelic games is really important to communities in a way of creating networks and connections within communities, and we now have got the evidence to show that that is the case.

We used a measurement framework called Social Return on Investment. Essentially that's a way of measuring the return on investment to society by measuring the social outcomes. So, we measure the value of the social outcomes, we measure the investments or the inputs that it costs for Gaelic games to take place, and then we work out the ratio. We calculated that for every euro invested in Gaelic Games on the island of Ireland, 2.3 euros of social value was generated as a result of that, so a positive return on that investment.

The other point I would make about the Social Value figures really is the importance of volunteering. The social value of outcomes related to volunteering for the Gaelic games study was about 77%. So, 77% of all the Social Value generated came from volunteering, and that was either the replacement cost of volunteering or the wellbeing benefits to volunteers themselves.

I think something that's quite distinct about Gaelic games is the importance of volunteers and volunteering. And when you convert that in terms of a monetary value, you realize how important significant volunteering is to game. I think it's worth making that point because I think that is quite distinctive.

This is a great recognition of the importance of volunteers. Without them the organization couldn't exist in its current form. The pressure that then creates for some volunteers can be over-burdening, but, on balance, the value is still hugely positive.

Simon Shibli: From the economic point of view, probably the headlines that's going to come out of this is that the taxation receipts from VAT and taxation on wages and payments to local authorities and so on comes to round about €193Million. I think in 2022 Gaelic games received something like €64Million from the Sports Capital Program, so Gaelic Games gives the government roughly three times what It receives back in funding,

There's been a bit of push back on the precise figure that was received, but the basic point doesn't change. Gaeilc games contributed around €193 million to the exchequer, Sport Ireland's turnover is something like €150 million, so Gaelic games gave back to the Government more than the entirety of what Sport Ireland receives in funding.

That unfortunately is not peculiar to Gaelic games. We see exactly the same across sport as an industry. Sport tends to be a net contributor rather than receiver of government funding.

GAA.ie: As you worked through your research, were there any tell-tale signs that the Gaelic games family is as much a community organisation as a sporting one.

Simon Shibli: When we travelled through Ireland we would see roadside billboards saying how much the local GAA club lotto was. And when I looked at the 513 sets of club accounts, something like 79% of all clubs run a lotto and they receive, on average, 23% of their funding from lotto receipts which is about twice the amount of funding they receive from membership receipts.

If I walk into Crookes here in Sheffield I can go to St Vincent's Church and outside St Vincent's it will say this week's jackpot (for St. Vincent’s GAA club) is £250 pounds. And I know it's not the Gaelic footballers, hurlers, or camogie players who are the only people buying the tickets. The fact is, this massive community buys in to support the clubs, That, for me, was a really useful litmus test as to how embedded these clubs are in local communities.

Then you see things like quite a few clubs raise money from playing bingo. Who plays bingo? It's older people. Some clubs run creches. Who benefit from them? Children. Some clubs put in walking tracks because it enables people who can't play vigorous intensity physical activity games like hurling or football to be physically active in a place which is safe and is welcoming.

There are many clubs which are installing gyms which enables people to be physically active as well as the clubs being able to do strength and conditioning work. When you look at the totality of all of that, it says this is a lot more than just providing Gaelic football, hurling and camogie.

Larissa Davies: I think there were quite a lot of examples in the Social Value study that indicated that that Gaelic games clubs function as community organizations as well as sporting organizations. As part of the research we interviewed 15 different stakeholders within the organizations.

One of the things we talked about was, ‘how does Gaelic games impact and make a difference to your life?’ Some people talked about how Gaelic games clubs integrated new people into communities. Beyond the sport itself there was a lot of work done by clubs to help migrants feel part of the community whether they played Gaelic games or not.

There was examples of clubs being used as hubs for retired people to come together to connect with other people in the community. Some of those people may have played Gaelic Games when they were younger, others didn’t. Those people weren't actually taking part in Gaelic Games when they came together, the club was their community hub.

People talked about how Gaelic Games clubs acted as COVID 19 vaccination centres during the pandemic and there were lots of other qualitative examples of how Gaelic Games and their associated clubs functioned as community organizations as well as sports organizations.

One of the things that we need to be mindful of with the Social Value part of this research is that the estimate, the €2.87 Billion, is actually quite a conservative estimate of the real Social Value of Gaelic Games. What we did in this research was only measure those outcomes where we had good data and a high level of evidence to suggest there was a link between Gaelic Games and the social outcomes.

There were lots of other things that people mentioned that we couldn't put a financial value on that we knew were occurring which added to the story and really built a picture of how Gaelic Games were truly integrated within Irish society. I think that was really powerful. So, when asked the question at the start about how were Gaelic Games and how was this study different to other sport, I think it was different in that way

The role that Gaelic Games plays in society beyond sport is a contribution that makes them distinctive.

Simon Shibli: One of the things that we did as well was what we call a supply side audit, where, in addition to measuring the demand side, asking people how much they spent, we also ask the businesses how much they benefited. And there are a series of quotes from various businesses that tell you things, like, ‘We really value having these finals.’ ‘It's like Christmas coming early.’ ‘We do three months business’.

And then there's a social side of things. ‘It's good for the town, we love the banter with the fans, we like to see them mingling and drinking together in the square’. Then there are these so-called ‘Pilgrimage Routes’, where, if you are going from Armagh or Donegal to Clones, there will be certain pubs, hotels, service stations, whatever, along the way that people would routinely stop as part of the pilgrimage to the final. It's capturing that part of the story that also says this is more than just sport, it's more than just watching sport.

GAA.ie: So, to sum up, Gaelic games are good for Ireland both socially and economically?

Simon Shibli: If our research could be distilled into one strapline, it would be, ‘Good for the economy and good for society’.

* The Economic Impact and Social Value report on Gaelic games can be downloaded below.