How often have you been in conversation with someone from abroad who lavishes extraordinary praise on hurling and gaelic football as the two most wonderful and enjoyable sports they have ever seen?

It happened to me only the other evening. We were standing on the sidelines watching our under-12 footballers go through their paces in preparation for an upcoming Division 4 semi-final when one of the parents, an Englishman, remarked to me – somewhat in awe – in praise of the skills and speed of the game as exemplified by the boys, including his own young lad.

As I watched a little ten years old half-forward nonchalantly solo goal-wards for the umpteenth time, I found it hard to disagree with my companion. In terms of the range of skills, physical and moral courage, speed, levels of fitness, rivalry and atmosphere there is little doubt that there are no other field games in the world that can match our games.

Why, then, are these games confined to a small island of some five million people plus isolated overseas pockets of the Irish Diaspora in North America, Britain, the Continent, Australia and Asia? Indeed, if it is hurling we are talking about, the game is essentially confined to about one third of the island. If skills, speed, atmosphere and all those other marvellous attributes are the true test of what makes a sport great, why are gaelic football and hurling not played by tens or even hundreds of millions of people world-wide, in the way that soccer, rugby, cricket, baseball, basketball and hockey are?

The answer to that conundrum is twofold. It is both historical and contemporary. First the bit of history. The late-Victorian era codification of games like rugby, soccer, hockey and cricket went hand-in-glove with the spread of those games throughout the then British Empire. The Empire understood that if the natives spoke English, followed English laws and played English games there was less chance of them kicking up a rumpus about exactly who was ripping off the profits from the rubber, coffee and tea plantations. Around the same time, the spread of American military power and influence throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, the Pacific Rim and Asia brought baseball and, to a lesser extent, basketball to more than twenty countries including Cuba, the Philippines, Japan and Korea.

So, when Michael Cusack, Maurice Davin, JK Bracken and the rest of the seven founders met in the billiards room of Hayes's Hotel in Thurles on 1st November 1884 they were not doing so merely because they thought hurling was in some way intrinsically better than hockey. Nor is running with a ball stuck under your oxter necessarily any better or worse than catching it and kicking it. No, they were doing it because hurling and Gaelic football are Irish games. If it was just about promoting sport or fitness, they might just as well have founded Cumann Haicí na nGael or Cumann Cricéid na nGael. Their move to promote hurling and Gaelic football was a conscious political assertion by them to counterbalance the influence of Empire in Ireland

The Irish, on the other hand, once boasted of enlightening a vast spiritual empire of black and yellow babies across Africa and Asia through the work of Catholic missionaries. Unfortunately for the spread of our games, the missionaries packed plenty of rosary beads and bottles of holy water but very few of them brought a camán and sliotar. One major effect of the British Empire on Ireland was to scatter some millions of Irish people and their descendants around the English-speaking world. But they were so impoverished and psychologically disoriented that their priorities were to survive and better themselves, rather than to spread gaelic games. In any event, the local authorities in whatever colony they found themselves in would have resisted any such attempts.

That historical evolution has been exacerbated by modern mass communications. Initially it was newspapers and radio, but now it includes television, satellite, cable and internet. The result is that the global sport of today is pre-eminently soccer with rugby, cricket, hockey, baseball and basketball enjoying strong pockets of continental or regional support. Consequently, these are the increasingly homogenised and packaged sports so favoured by the media moguls and their tame 'blazers'. The whole aim of this globalisation is to have just a handful of sports broadcast world-wide, with the same handful of brands and sponsors using the same advertisements to sell their products on five continents with a few financial crumbs thrown in to keep the players happy.

To the marketing people, Gaelic football and - more especially - hurling are just quirky, minority, locally-popular sports that stand in the way of global dominance. They are up there with tossing the caber or synchronised swimming. The globalisation of sport in the service of capital is the greatest single challenge facing the GAA into the future. Baseball has been sweeping across Asia and is now the hottest sport in China. China’s vast population and burgeoning economy seem set to make baseball the ‘most played’ sport in world over the next decade. Rest assured, a Chinese team will win the World Series long before we tune in some Sunday night to hear Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin announcing the result of the All China senior football championship as ‘Peking Pearses 1-11 Shanghai Shamrocks 0-9’

Many thorny and unresolved financial and business issues have arisen in the GAA in recent years - players’ remuneration and representation, competition between gear suppliers, kit sponsorships, corporate boxes, opening up Croke Park and so on. These are really early warning signs that our games are facing into stiffer competition from the global sports and their media backers. The departure of Niall Cogley as Head of Sport in RTÉ to Setanta, just as broadcasting rights for the major games are up for renewal, is no coincidence. Mr. Murdoch and his Sky cohorts will, doubtless, be interested as well and we know what that meant a few years ago for followers of the international soccer team.

I suspect the day is not far off when ‘Dis Great Association of Ours’ may have to make an agonising choice between regular free-to-air terrestrial coverage of all games and a cable / satellite deal that will include overseas coverage thrown in as a sweetener. If that happens, the price will need to be much more than just a fee for broadcasting rights. For our games, the best means of defence is attack. So, such a coverage package would have to include a financial commitment to a strong marketing programme to underpin any overseas coverage, possibly targeted at areas with high Irish-origin populations and with appropriate brands and sponsors tied in.

Rather than tinkering with symptoms, the next few years will be a time for cool heads and strategic thinking. The critical thing for the GAA will be to understand the global context it is operating in; against that background, set out some clear strategic goals for where we want the games to be in ten or fifteen years time and then put in place the action programmes that are needed us to get us there.

Whatever happens, I hope we will still have those under-12s turning up for training at our local Páirc na nGael.

The above article was first published in 'High Ball' magazine and is reproduced here by kind permission of the Editor, Damian Dowds