What's going on at the GAA?
What's going on at the GAA?
The ongoing GAAGO conversation and using AI-generated material show an organisation struggling to find the right path.
On Saturday morning, the excellent artist Barry Masterson shared some images from recent GAA match programmes which, on the cover, display absurdly awful AI-generated imagery. The reaction was understandably downtrodden, particularly from many of the hard-working designers and illustrators who would only love the opportunity to have their work seen by match-goers, only for these jobs to be replaced by lazy AI alternatives.
In many ways, it was a perfect metaphor of the GAA of 2024—bizarre decision making and seeing the cost of everything but the value of nothing.
According to Mark Tighe of the Irish Independent, the “art” was an experiment by one of its partners, but I’m not sure what reviewer signs off on images that depict a Kerry footballer with six fingers, a Leinster hurler with a stupidly long hurley, or cartoon players with their helmet guards poking into their mouths.
GAA programmes but may not have the same appeal as yesteryear, but these ones may be collectors items off the back of this story.
Either way, it’s another dart in the direction of the GAA. The ongoing GAAGO debate has ran wild once again this championship season. I’m not going to add too many more words to the bundles of column inches that have already covered it, including on these pages last year, but the fact this conversation is repeating itself 12 months on when many of the issues were first discovered is very lamentable.
Sticking massive championship games behind an online paywall will only ever be a controversial move from the GAA. The relationship with RTÉ adds fuel to the fire for an organisation that seems hell bent on denying the vast majority of fans the opportunity to see the biggest games the competitions have to offer.
One defence of the online platform is that every game simply can’t be shown on television, which is completely understandable, but you can theoretically stream every game and they couldn’t even achieve that this weekend, as Mayo and Cavan fans discovered. So one of the selling points of GAAGO has proven useless for subscribers from those respective counties.
It’s been a weird season so far. It feels like the actual games have become a bit of a nuisance, as we absolutely bolt through the hurling provincial championships while, in contrast, the football provincials become a bit of a side-story before we move along to the All-Ireland group stage.
A more than half empty Croke Park illustrates a Leinster provincial competition on its death bed. At least Ulster provides some semblance of passion before the group stages, but the sheer volume of games will quickly saturate our brains. The leagues now quickly come and go, a mere afterthought, a blip in the season, while we absolutely hurtle into the premier competitions with very little time to breath.
It’s all so fast paced and with so much media coverage being dedicated to the fallacies of the organisation and GAAGO, there’s little time to stop and gauge how the actual games are going, how the teams are performing and how the season is being shaped heading into the business end of the campaigns.
It also leaves so little time to market the games to fans. On Saturday, Derry and Galway met in Pearse Stadium in front of just over 7,000 fans. It’d be interesting to see the GAAGO figures on this one to see if that could even double the numbers. Two teams that may have a big say in the All-Ireland series was barely a murmur across the overall sporting weekend.
Before we know it, the All-Ireland finals stages will come and go in July and it’ll have all felt like a bit of a blur, games seen and unseen, highlight packages barely scraping two minutes of a Sunday night. There is so much nuance, story and context going astray.
The split season is undoubtedly necessary for the greater health of the sport across all levels around the country, but tweaks are certainly needed at the inter-county tiers to give things a chance to operate at their optimum. It feels like the games are operating in a straitjacket.
The frustrating thing is there are so many easy wins out there for the GAA to gain a bit of goodwill.
Easing social media restrictions on clip-sharing would allow more content creators to get involved, getting the best bits out to wider audiences. Getting extended highlights up on YouTube would ease the frustration of seeing ninety second highlights with zero nuance on The Sunday Game.
Going back to the drawing board with television rights deals at the next available opportunity is a must. Giving TG4, for example, just a single game of a weekend would ease a lot of the burden throttling RTÉ and GAAGO. There’s more games than ever across various codes and the rights deals need to adjust accordingly.
More televised content around games would be very much welcome, too. The addition of Ratified, a new weekly web show on GAAGO, is a start, but there’s space for a midweek or a weekend morning roundtable or magazine type show interviewing the cast and characters around the game and giving the games further exposure. What better way to market games ahead of the weekend than to preview them on television during the week?
Even things like statistical and historical databases seem beyond the GAA’s ability. The official website is a shell, with no gold standard available anywhere in terms of historical results, stats and data. It’s a small but notable omission from an organisation steeped in history with so much information in its annals.
And finally, getting onto local artists and illustrators for marketing content and programme illustrations. Why on earth they thought AI was a viable option is beyond me. It stinks of laziness and is an embarrassing moment for the GAA, becoming another stick to beat them with as they go from rake to rake like Sideshow Bob. If budget is an issue, there is plenty of free editing software out there that would do a semi-professional job, rather than turning to nonsensical AI garbage.
Whatever this experiment had intended, it was a failure, and the GAA must react to what fans would like to see and expect from a supposedly innovative organisation that continues to feel like it’s losing its way.