Where have all the sponsors gone?

The recently released half-year figures for Irish horse racing from HRI showed positive trends in a number of key indicators to the health of the sport - Horses in training up 24% (compared to same period in 2019), active owners up 23.9%, runners in races up 23.8% - but one area where the sport took a massive dip was in race sponsorship.

Race sponsorship in the first six months of 2021 amounted to €1,485,000 compared to €4,199,000 in the same period in 2019. A drop of 64.6%.

Comparing 2021 to the pre-Covid 2019 may not be a fair comparison when it comes to race sponsorship but money from sponsorship is also down 25% compared to the same period in 2020 when there was no horse racing for almost half of the opening six months that year.

The average sponsorship per race in 2021 is €1,062 compared to €3,300 for the same period last year and a similar €3,442 per race in 2019. A quick look at recent race meetings shows an alarming number of unsponsored races. If it wasn’t for the industry’s own Irish Stallion Farms and European Breeders’ Fund many racecourses would hardly have a sponsored race.

Compare this to amateur and local sports in the country where virtually all contests are sponsored. Point-to-Point racing has close to 100% of races carrying a sponsor’s title.

There is also a big difference from racecourse to racecourse. Some tracks, particularly those hosting festivals, seem to be hanging on to their sponsors but other tracks look to have almost given up.

The benefit of race sponsorship for a business is not easily quantifiable. It must be virtually impossible to link sales to having your name in a race title. Completely impossible if you were the sponsor of the “Price Boost Favourites Apprentice Maiden” at a recent meeting. Whatever bright spark came up with that race name should be sent back to marketing school for a refresher course.

I recently received a number of emails regarding a late change in the race titles for an upcoming meeting at Down Royal where the on-course bookmakers have come on board as race sponsors. All were understandably keen to see their names in print next to the races that they had paid to sponsor but some of those same bookmakers have online operations where race sponsors’ names never appear on their race card descriptions.

Considering bookmakers sponsor many of the biggest races within the sport it's odd that none of their websites carry the sponsors’ names on their race cards. Their race cards are simply titled with the race type and distance and give no mention to the sponsor.

Of course the strangest aspect to race sponsorship in Ireland is that it generally makes no difference to the prize money offered for the race whether there is a sponsor or not. You would think a company putting €1,000 or more into the sponsorship of a race would in some way be reflected in the total prize money but it’s not.

Perhaps a centralised clearing house for sponsors is something that could be looked at by either Horse Racing Ireland or the Association of Racecourses. If an individual racecourse can’t find a sponsor for one of it’s races then HRI or AIR could offer the race to a database of known sponsors and the highest bidder gets their name associated with the race. Similar systems work successfully in both online and print advertising.

The eagerly anticipated result of Stephen Mahon’s Appeal against his record four-year ban from training is taking longer than anticipated. The three-person panel, which includes two High Court Judges, is heading into it’s fourth week of deliberations suggesting that their decision is far from a straightforward dismissal of the Appeal.

Earlier this year an Appeals Panel took just nine days to reach a decision on Charles Byrnes’ Appeal against his six months ban. In Byrnes’s case the appeal was dismissed.

The Limerick trainer, whose stable’s horses are now running in his son Cathal’s name, will have completed his ban in another two weeks, while Gordon Elliott is also nearing the end of his suspension and will be back in action one week later. I wonder #whatodds the treble comes up and that all three suspended men are back training horses in September?