When I was in college I used to regularly drive up and down the country covering League of Ireland games for Goal.com.
In a typical week during the season I might have travelled to Oriel Park to cover Dundalk on a Friday night, to Tallaght Stadium to report on Shamrock Rovers for a mid-week Cup game, to the Carlisle Grounds in Bray for whenever I decided it would be a good idea to freeze my fingers off for 90 minutes in early February.
It was a great experience for a student journalist looking to go watch football and interview managers and players.
I got to write match reports, ask questions, watch how other journalists approached their craft and above all else, enjoyed the novelty of gaining accreditation and being paid to attend a football match. As far as I was concerned, a better job in college did not exist.
Eventually, Goal.com ceased their weekly coverage of the League of Ireland. It wasn’t worth the investment for one of the world’s biggest football sites and the situation in Ireland is not much better.
After college I went to work on the online desk at the Irish Independent.
The Independent have some great football reporters but in a world where you get live feedback on the readership figures for each and every story that is published, League of Ireland stories are generally pushed more towards the online graveyard than they are towards the top of the home page. You’re lucky if the reports of your favourite team are tweeted.
It’s hard for national publications to send reporters to events that are of little interest to the nation and it’s equally hard to promote a league where national publications are hesitant to send reporters to games for that very reason. It’s a cycle.
The League of Ireland punches well above its weight in terms of coverage but a lot of the reporters covering the league are writing stories to either fill a page on a newspaper, or alternatively and increasingly, for some startup podcast/website/blog etc.
In an online world where goals are all over Twitter within minutes of being scored, it took just under two days for Kieran Sadlier’s goal from just outside his own box to find its way onto Twitter. The PRO14, who are by no means a social media juggernaut, are tweeting videos of tries during games.
Kieran Sadlier from inside his own penalty area! Incredible!! #GreatestLeagueInTheWorld #LOI pic.twitter.com/6YUcMmSbYN
— League of Ireland (@LeagueofIreland) May 27, 2018
RTE run a highlights show called Soccer Republic at 11:05pm on a Monday night (the broadcasting equivalent of the graveyard timeslot), the League of Ireland run their own podcast and a number of national news publications also run their own LOI podcasts as they try and make the transition to a more contemporary format.
But if there was ever a league where a Fan TV channel could work it’s the League of Ireland. It’s essentially a blank canvas. Throw shit against the wall and see what sticks.
LOI TV and Irish Football Fan TV are the first real incarnations of fan channels in the League of Ireland, and despite being only four months old, LOI TV fan reaction videos already have more views than highlights of the actual games they are covering, and more eyeballs watching them than there are those that are reading reports of the games they’re talking about.
The success of Arsenal Fan TV, the widely popular yet also widely derided fan channel, has inspired many other fan tv channels throughout the UK so it was really only a matter of time before someone brought the concept to Irish shores.
Fan tv channels will tell you that they’re there to act as a voice of the fans, that they exist as an unfiltered medium for supporters to have their opinions aired and shared.
In a way it’s the beauty of internet fan tv. They control their own content, they interview who they want where they want, they cannot be censored by a league, press officer, editor or otherwise, and their interviewees often give impassioned responses to questions that journalists, pundits or presenters would otherwise be slammed for being biased or unprofessional. They tap into a market that often cannot satisfied by traditional media.
They also can be used as vehicles for fans to sprout utter nonsense, completely unchecked, but that’s to be expected and it’s also strangely part of the allure at times.
If you have a YouTube channel that is less than four months old and it’s already outperforming official highlights videos from the FAI, there’s enough reason to believe that there’s a future for this type of content in a League of Ireland market that is starved of national mainstream coverage.
While the FAI are spending tens of thousands on international branding experts who suggest that playing games of FIFA on big screens at half-time and showing live scores of games at bus stops are the way forward for the league, three teenagers have been more effective at reaching audiences on YouTube, a platform that looks destined to one day overtake television, than the league itself.
‘How to market the League of Ireland’ has been a question that has been booted up and down newsrooms, studios, clubhouses and offices for decades with no real definitive answer or solution.
How do you market a league where players like Richie Towell, Daryl Horgan, Andy Boyle and Sean Maguire are snapped up by English clubs as soon as they start to gain any sort of traction nationally?
Is Graham Burke, who could start for Ireland against the US on Saturday, still playing League of Ireland football next season? Can anyone say that he will be with any great degree of confidence?
When I went to visit Bohemians a few months ago I spoke to the club’s strategic planning executive Dan Lambert about how the club were creating a connection with their fans.
Lambert told me that Bohemians focused on building rapport with their supporters, working with local sponsors, playing music from local bands in their club bar and serving local pints and local food. They doubled and tripled down on locality.
The focus for Bohs was on creating an environment and culture where fans wanted to go to games because of the club and not necessarily because of the performance of the team.
We saw with Arsenal Fan TV that Arsenal fans and casual observers were just as, if not more interested in what channel regulars ‘Troopz’ or ‘DT’ had to say about former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger than what they were with what Paul Merson, Martin Keown or any other former Arsenal player had to say about the Frenchman.
It’s no coincidence that these people eventually ended up talking about Wenger live on Sky Sports. This is the Brave New Sports World we live in.
In this particular world of fan tv channels, it’s feasible to think that Martin, John or Serena’s take on Greg Bolger could hold just as much weight with a younger generation of League of Ireland fan as what Declan ‘Fabio’ O’Brien has to say on Soccer Republic at 11:30pm on a Monday night.
Nothing is ever as good as the original. Of all the fan tv channels out there, and there are many, Arsenal Fan TV is still the behemoth that stands tall above the rest.
But in a league that desperately struggles for attention, fan tv could be the future, if not the present.
Because what’s the alternative; match reports, podcasts and Hollywood walks of fame?
Back to the drawing board, or maybe more aptly, the screen of your smartphone.
