Irish business and government support Gaelic football's Asian growth

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Irish business and government support Gaelic football's Asian growth

Authored by: Julian Clark
on Monday, October 03 2005 @ 12:55 pm ACST

Comparing USA vs Asian locals involvement is a bit tough... Getting locals involved in Asia is very very difficult... particularly when a game involves a flight and a hotel.

Of course - if we had lots of locals involved, we could play matches in our own cities (as in Japan)... but what comes first the chicken or the egg ???

Japan has good local involvement in their league for 2 reasons... 1) the Japanese are generally more affluent than the rest of Asia with a similar middle class society to that of the west. 2) sport is compulsory at Japanese universities.

The Java league is successful due to the massive volunteer efforts of the wild man of borneo (Baldy).. that is effectively a full time job and would roughly equate to a donation of A$ 6-figures each and every year

So - we are stuck with locals for the time being... we NEED to be recruiting GAA players into Footy (and vice versa)... if we only play 5 games of each a year there is no clashes... but with double the players - hey presto - there is 2 teams and matches are played locally and locals can have something to get involved in.

Whilst AFL clubs around Asia (and indeed around the world) would love to have more locals involved, we at least need to remain active in the interim... the incentive for any AFL body globally has to be localisation in order to get AFL recognition and support. This is (or at least was) different to the International GAA.

I have played in GAA tournaments in Europe and in Asia and the only non-Irish are typically a couple of footy starved Aussies and maybe the odd local in Europe... OK - perhaps that is a bit harsh (there was one local training with us in Singapore when I was there) but in speaking to the GAA hierarchy in both continents - the focus was not at all on developing locals - only to maintain a standard of life for offshore Irish... perhaps their is now encouragement to develop locals with the new corporate backing ??? I guess that they want to get maximum return for their investment and should hope to see locals involved.

Would be interesting to know what is happening in that respect.

Irish business and government support Gaelic football's Asian growth

Authored by: Peter Parry
on Monday, October 03 2005 @ 06:49 pm ACST

Rooster it is correct that GAA clubs first priority has been to expats and maintaining Irish culture. But something has changed in a few clubs - the mainland Chinese ones - in the last couple of years. This report from Beijing GAA

http://www.beijinggaa.net/

suggests the game is taking off with Chinese locals. The comments by a GAA official that some of the best players are as good as any in Ireland would seem to be referring to chinese nationals.

Obviously the Games attract a lot of expats from everywhere - there were 22 nationalities present on the field in the Beijing Games. - No longer just a bunch of paddys "kikn 'rownd ahn O'Neills".

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