When I began hatching plans for our Sports Matters podcast series, which ended this week, a leading sport administrator told me I needed to sit down with the accountant Ciaran Medlar. “He is the most influential person in Irish sport,” he briefed me. 

My friend had a point. Consider this. In recent weeks, Medlar’s longstanding client Johnny Sexton took a coaching role with Ireland and the British & Irish Lions, while a boardroom tussle has emerged at Shamrock Rovers, the football club he chairs. Meanwhile, another client, Rory McIlroy, won the US Masters, and with it, the Career Grand Slam. 

Medlar is now reducing his duties somewhat at BDO, the firm he has worked with for three decades, to take a larger role managing McIlroy’s financial affairs. 

His start in the world of sport came in the early 1990s, when he was introduced to the industry by Fintan Drury, a pioneering figure in Irish sports management. It was virgin territory with limited commercial opportunities and deals. Since then, however, the industry around sport in Ireland has exploded.

“The market has grown hugely in that period of time, and the number of people involved in it at various levels of it, whether it is agency, whether it is brand, whether it is marketing, whether it is sponsorship,” he told me in the first episode of the series. “The clubs themselves have become much more professional, both in rugby and football, because the market has evolved, and the opportunities have evolved. It is a very different world than it was back at that time, but it is thriving at the moment,” he told me. 

This has created both challenges and opportunities. 

And few have witnessed the two sides of this coin better than Peter McKenna, the stadium director of Croke Park and also the commercial head for the wider GAA. He joined Croke Park in 2001 when it was still a building site, and was tasked with finishing the work and then paying off the debt associated with it. 

Since then, the stadium has been transformed into a financial powerhouse, paying dividends to the GAA of close to €50 million in the last three years. 

McKenna, however, argues that there has to be a balance between money and sport. 

“If you went purely commercial, you could double the bottom line in Croke Park. You’d change the price of corporate seats, you’d change the price of boxes,” he told me.  

“You’d almost make them unattainable, and you’d get the Wembley factor where real estate is left empty for large swaths of the year and people only turn up for the big games. You’d double your rents for concerts and various other bits and pieces, you’d shoot up the price of drink and food and beverage. All of that, though, would change what we’re about, you know, and I think if we alienate ourselves from the 700,000 GAA members across the country, we have lost the plot.”

Like in so many sports, people feel they have ownership of the GAA. It means they take a vested interest when the organisation makes a commercial decision, such as the move to paywall certain matches on the GAA’s streaming service. 

The growth in the business of sport has also created new layers of governance, ethics, welfare, safeguarding and compliance. With most sporting bodies and clubs dominated by non-paid volunteers, this places additional responsibilities on people who are often not trained adequately. 

This was a central theme in my discussion with Sarah Keane, the chief executive of Swim Ireland and the former president of the Olympic Federation of Ireland. A corporate lawyer, she was involved in overhauling the crisis-ridden OFI during her tenure. 

“Governance has changed completely in the last 20 years,” she said, “but I’m not so sure people are looking under the hood to see if any of those things are working.”

Her overarching concern is that, in an effort to beef up governance and accountability, many organisations are falling into the trap of box-ticking.

“I think there’s still an awful lot of tick-boxing going on across Irish sport. That’s why we have a crisis and everything [is] fine again for a couple of years, and then we go again, and then we go again – because there’s too much box-ticking going on.”

The changing dynamic of volunteers in sport was also key to my conversation with Aoife Farrelly and Emma Richmond. Farrelly is a barrister and chair of the Sports Law Bar Association. Meanwhile, Richmond is the joint managing partner of the law firm Whitney Moore and has worked with a host of professional athletes, sporting organisations, clubs and sports tech firms. 

“They need to adhere to the same standards that they would if they were running their own business,” said Richmond. “Sometimes that’s certainly where we see the issues can arise – how somebody deals with an employee of a club. And whether it’s your barman or your groundskeeper.”

Often, these volunteers lack the legal training to navigate employment law properly, and the consequences can be significant. “Clubs don’t necessarily want to put their money into spending it on legal fees,” she added. “But if they can spend it early, they’ll spend a lot less than they will down in the WRC defending an employment claim.”

Like Keane, Farrelly and Richmond, Sam Murray Hinde has spent a lot of time thinking about culture, ethics and governance in sport. A UK-based employment law specialist, Murray Hinde has played a pivotal role in some of the most high-profile legal battles in British sport, from the Yorkshire Cricket Club racism scandal to the abuse allegations within British Gymnastics.

The way she sees it, changing culture is a journey: it doesn’t happen overnight and requires organisations to be open to constant reinvention. 

“I think it takes time to rebuild trust, and you need to start with a good foundation, even if that means back-pedalling a bit and then rebuilding forward, and Yorkshire, part of the whistle-blowing hotline was to do that, to encourage people to speak up, that transparency and addressing the complaints,” she told me.

Throughout all the conversations, the importance of putting the athlete, whether a young child or a high-paid professional, was central. 

And that was what made my chat with Marty Moore and Niall Woods so interesting. The two former rugby internationals both retired suddenly – Woods was ravaged by injury, and Moore, having battled his way back from a career-threatening injury, stepped back to protect his mental wellbeing.

Both discussed the impact of the sudden stop on the lives, from financial to mental.

“To be honest, I felt like as long as my body could go, I would push it because I didn’t want to have to deal with life after sport. I used to say, ‘I’ll go till the wheels fall off physically.’ It was obviously psychological in the end, I just couldn’t take any more of it. It wasn’t healthy for me,” Moore told me.

I found the series fascinating to record, and I hope you enjoyed it. Many thanks to the law firm Whitney Moore for supporting the series. We will be launching a new podcast series on Thursday. Stay tuned.

Elsewhere last week….

With job cuts looming and production underutilised, Intel’s Irish operations face mounting pressure amid global market decline and leadership reshuffles. John Reynolds examined Intel’s Irish reckoning.

Having spent most of the past 20 years in China, furniture designer Frank Carroll saw his company Alfrank Designs face insolvency last year. Aged 71, he was asked: “Do you still want to do it?” AS he turns out, the answer was yes, as he told Thomas in a wonderful interview.

Squirrelled away in a nondescript office building in Kilmainham, you’ll find the base of Klas, the Irish-headquartered telecoms equipment maker that has just been taken over by the controversial US company Anduril. Jonathan had the details.

Sprintax, part of Terry Clune’s Clunetech, has built a big business handling taxes for non-US residents. Enda Kelleher and Ryan Ludden told Michael of its UK expansion and move into dividend taxes.