Páirc Uí Chaoimh naming rights up for grabs

CORK County Board secretary/CEO Kevin O’Donovan expects the subject of naming rights for Páirc Uí Chaoimh to come to the fore again in 2020.

This was seen as an important area for potential revenue when the stadium opened, but the issues with the pitch have meant that everything else has taken a back seat.

With that sorted, O’Donovan expects movement with the naming rights.

‘The first steps with naming rights were taken a number of years ago,’ he said.

‘There was an agency involved and then it wasn’t followed up and the pitch issue kicked in.

‘Since then, we have just pressed ‘pause’ on premium seats, everything, even getting a county championship sponsor – the first thing that they would ask is where would the county final be on. We needed to have the pitch sorted.

‘It might be unusual to talk about a pitch in such terms but it is central to so many things that we do, but all of that is going to rock now.

‘The naming-rights conversation is going to continue now, but that market is pretty narrow and pretty specialist.

It’s not something we can do in a five-minute turnaround but we feel now that there is a product there.

‘If we had successful Cork teams though, that changes a lot of things in these accounts. We can harp on about the cost of running inter-county teams, but success at inter-county makes things very different.’