Dublin , Ireland – 3 September 2016; Defensive Lineman Patrick Gamble (C) and Offensive Lineman … [+]
On the first Saturday of November in 1996, John Anthony was in Dublin, Ireland for the Notre Dame-Navy football game, a rivalry that dates to the 1920s. Anthony, a 1986 Notre Dame alum, was close to the Fighting Irish program, having a few years earlier started a company, Anthony Travel, that handled all of Notre Dame’s travel needs. As such, Anthony spent numerous weekends on the road with the Fighting Irish, but he had never before attended a game in Ireland.
That experience nearly 26 years ago showed Anthony that college football could work in Ireland under the right circumstances, and it led to him many years later floating the idea that the country could host more games. Now, Anthony and his namesake firm are fully invested in bringing the sport to Ireland.
On Saturday, Nebraska faces Northwestern
For now, Anthony Travel has partnered with Irish hospitality and events company Corporate.ie to organize, manage and promote a college football game in Dublin this year and in each of the next four years. Next August, Notre Dame again plays Navy in Dublin, while the teams for the 2024, 2025 and 2026 games have not been announced. If all goes well, the companies want to keep it up for as long as possible.
Aer Lingus, the leading airline in Ireland, is serving as the title sponsor and is providing the teams with free charter flights to and from Dublin, with Nebraska arriving on Tuesday and Northwestern scheduled to land on Wednesday.
Failte Ireland and Tourism Ireland, both tourism agencies, are also financial sponsors, as is the Dublin City Council. Those entities see the games as ways to bring people to Ireland for extended periods, not just for the games, according to Anthony and Padraic O’Kane, Corporate.ie’s chief executive.
An estimated 13,000 people from the U.S. are expected to fly to Dublin for the game, including 10,000 Nebraska fans and 3,000 Northwestern fans. The organizers estimate that the total attendance will be about 36,000 in the 49,000-seat Aviva Stadium.
A large number of fans coming from the U.S. booked their trips through Anthony Travel, which is now an affiliate of On Location, Endeavor Group Holdings, Inc.’s sports and music ticketing and hospitality subsidiary.
John Anthony noted that the eight-day, three-city package was the biggest seller, followed by a six-day, two-city package.
“Most people do not just go to Dublin for a few days and turn around and go back,” Anthony said. “That’s the driver of this. That’s why Ireland embraces it so much. Ireland, more than any other country I’ve been to, they embrace the relationship with the U.S. and talk about how critically important it is to them as a country and as an economy and everything else.”
The first college football game in Ireland occurred in 1988 when Boston College defeated Army in the Emerald Isle Classic in Dublin. Since then, the country has hosted several more games, the last occurring in 2016 when Georgia Tech defeated Boston College.
Anthony Travel and Corporate.ie worked together on that game six years ago, as well, but they realized that in order to make the model work on an ongoing basis they needed the support from sponsors, the tourism agencies and the government.
O’Kane, the head of Corporate.ie, noted that Ireland does not have the infrastructure or space to bid for an Olympics, World Cup or other huge international event. But he added that the city of Dublin and financial sponsors realized that U.S. sports fans would be drawn to following their college football teams to Ireland, and tens of millions of Americans have Irish ancestry.
“We see this as a major event,” O’Kane said. “Being able to host the college football season opener in Dublin once a year on an annual basis is really important to us.”
He added: “There’s only so much we can take in (when it comes to events). This one really works for us because if Ireland’s on your bucket list and Europe’s on your bucket list for a holiday, college football works. People come in for a week, come in for 10 days, they travel throughout the country and take it all in. There’s not many events like that that can give an Irish economy that is hugely reliant on agriculture and tourism, there’s not many events that pay off and have the value for us.”
The teams involved in the game are compensated for competing and have their travel expenses covered, with the home team (in this year’s case, Northwestern, and next year’s case, Navy) getting enough money to offset a lost game in their home stadium in the U.S.
As such, Anthony Travel and Corporate.ie target home teams that do not have a huge home stadium in the U.S. and are more affordable than the sport’s most popular programs. Nebraska and Notre Dame, for instance, are the away teams in the Ireland games this year and next year, so they will not have to have one fewer home game in their usual packed stadiums.
“There’s an affordability factor here with it,” O’Kane said. “It’s getting two good football teams, but from a financial perspective, we look at small teams (to serve as the home teams) that we can really afford.”
The five-year deal between Anthony Travel and Corporate.ie was scheduled to start in 2020 with a Notre Dame-Navy game and continue last year with a Nebraska-Illinois game. But both games were cancelled due to Covid-19. They were able to re-schedule the Notre Dame-Navy game to next year because Navy was hosting Notre Dame anyway and was willing to do so in Ireland. But Nebraska did not want to give up a scheduled home game with Illinois this year because the amount of money offered in Ireland would not have made up for losing a game in its 90,000-seat Memorial Stadium.
Anthony said that Northwestern was eager to step in and move its scheduled home game against Nebraska to Ireland this year, particularly because many at the school and in the Chicago-area has strong connections to Ireland. Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern’s longtime coach, is Irish-American, as is the influential Ryan family, which last year gave $480 million to Northwestern, the largest gift in the school’s history.
“Northwestern said early on they were very interested in doing this,” Anthony said. “They think it makes a lot of sense for them as a University.”
Nebraska, meanwhile, is enthusiastic about heading to Ireland, as well. Bob Burton, the school’s executive associate athletics director, said he and a few other Nebraska officials first flew to Ireland for a site visit in early 2020 before the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, just to have a look at what it would entail to play the 2021 Illinois game in the country.
Burton visited Dublin again this summer along with the team’s nutritionist, director of football operations, two representatives from the alumni association and other people who toured the hotel, stadium and other places.
During a normal regular season away game, Nebraska flies out on Friday afternoon and returns home immediately after the game ends on Saturday. For a bowl game, the team arrives a few days before the game, but the administrators already have a plan they follow and are familiar with those settings. But traveling to a foreign country meant additional planning and a longer stay, as the team arrived on Tuesday and is leaving after the game on Saturday.
“We worked through, day-by-day, the logistics of how this was going to flow,” Burton said. “It’s more intense (than a regular season or bowl game).”
Still, it’s not strictly a football-only trip. The team plans on visiting historical sites in Dublin such as the Kilmainham Gaol, a former prison built in 1796, and the Christ Church Cathedral, which was built in the 11th century.
“I think it’s going to be a great cultural experience for the members of the team,” Burton said.
Anthony noted that there will be social events for fans throughout the week, including tailgates and pep rallies. And there will be an Ireland-US CEO Club lunch on Friday afternoon at the Mansion House in Dublin for about 420 executives from the U.S., Ireland and Europe. Gwynne Shotwell, a Northwestern graduate and president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, will serve as the keynote speaker.
“We love it on every level,” Anthony said of the College Football Classic. “We love it for philosophically what it does because there’s nothing better for a student-athlete to get an experience like this that they’ll be telling their grandkids about. We love it for the Universities because we’ve seen how impactful it is when all the fans come together over there. And on a business sense, it works for us also or else we wouldn’t be able to keep doing it.”
Ireland is not the only country outside the U.S. to have hosted college football games. Australia hosted the last game in 2017 when Stanford defeated Rice, while Japan hosted a few games in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Anthony said he has contacted other countries about hosting games, although nothing has come to fruition.
“We’re interested, but (the countries) have not quite come up with the right formula yet,” Anthony said. “It needs a lot of support. The schools cannot afford to lose money by playing overseas, so we’ve got to be able to replace what they are missing from playing at home. That’s not an easy needle to thread.”
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/timcasey/2022/08/24/how-companies-city-of-dublin-tourism-agencies-helped-bring-college-football-to-ireland/