The Wide, Wide World of Sports

Published in Bar & Beverage, Fall 2009:

Beer, pretzels and wings are three things you might reasonably expect at any sports bar in the Great White North.

On the wide screen, you might expect baseball, basketball, hockey, NASCAR and what we in this part of the world call football.

But how about cricket, rugby or Australian rules football? Hurling, poker or mixed martial arts?

Welcome to the world of niche sports programming, where bar managers cater to pastime preferences and televisual tastes that veer from the Canadian commonplace.

The good folks at Setanta Sports can help a bar manager out with that. The specialty channel’s offerings in early July included All Ireland Football, rugby from Australia and South Africa, and the Leinster Senior Hurling Championship.

Hurling is a Gaelic team sport played outdoors with sticks called hurleys and a ball resembling a baseball. Points are scored by hitting the ball, called a sliotar, between the opposing team’s goalposts.

“You should watch it sometime, because it is one of the most, uh, aggressive sports that I have ever watched,” Setanta spokesperson Andy Shapiera says at his Toronto office. “It’s quite interesting and very popular with the Irish community, as is Gaelic football. We carry Gaelic football as well.”

Setanta Sports has expanded its reach since springing up in Ireland 19 years ago. Its Canadian version was launched two years ago in partnership with Rogers Media.

“Our market has grown substantially since we launched,” Shapiera says. “There’s definitely an appetite, especially among the soccer community, for the type of programming that we’re offering.

“We try and focus on the major competitions when it comes to soccer. We don’t give our viewers things that would be considered Tier 2 events. We give them the Tier 1 events. We show things like the Barclays Premier League. We show things like the FA Cup.”

Setanta is an “a la carte” channel (meaning it’s not packaged with any other channel) available from nearly every major television service provider in Canada. Bars can use Setanta’s Premium service – “almost like a pay-per-view basis,” says Shapiera – to purchase events that residential subscribers don’t have access to.

“We’re serving a market that was grossly underserved prior to the arrival of Setanta,” he says. “A lot of the top leagues, the only way to get access to these leagues here was through the Internet. You wouldn’t be able to get television access.”

Setanta’s sporting menu – which also includes Australian rules football and Major League Soccer – presents opportunities for bar operators to draw patrons who otherwise might not visit their establishments.

Phill Sheckley, manager of the Elephant & Castle on King Street in Toronto, recognizes those opportunities. He has seen how rugby and soccer can brings patrons in, day and night.

“With rugby, for example,” he says, “you’ve just had the British and Irish Lions Tour of South Africa (in July). That only happens once every four years. The games were shown at 9 in the morning on Saturday. And even though we can’t serve alcohol at that time, there were still people coming out to watch the games.”

A native of the British Isles, Sheckley hopes rugby, soccer and the like will appeal to expats in the Big Smoke.

“What we’re going to start doing here is breakfast and brunch when the soccer season starts,” he explains. “We are going be showing games from England that start at 8 o’clock in the morning (Toronto time). We obviously won’t be serving alcohol at this time, it will just be a soccer breakfast. That’s what we’re going to call it.

“That will be every Saturday morning. And then the game on Sunday will start at 10:30, just before we can start serving alcohol.

“It would be nice if our sales could be helped by serving alcohol, but the soccer programming from England on Saturday is in three-game blocks and hopefully by sometime in the second game we can start serving alcohol.”

Sheckley’s motivation is simple: “I want to showcase the pub. And even if somebody is coming here and not having alcoholic beverages this time, they’ll think about coming back for dinner and drinks and what have you.

“It’s an opportunity to showcase our pub, and we’ll still make money on the breakfast, of course.

“Some games will be on weeknights, at about 3 in the afternoon Toronto time. Soccer has a massive profile in the world. We’re a British pub, and it’s the number one British sport. Also, the World Cup in South Africa is coming 2010, so it makes sense to build into that, you know.”

He’s confident the strategy will work. “My room holds 160 people,” he says, “and while I’m not expecting it to be full straight away, I’m pretty confident that it will get very busy because there’s not many places that have the facilities we have downtown and we’re the biggest British pub downtown.

“There are a lot of expats going to smaller and older venues right now. Once the word gets out, I expect many of them will be coming here instead.”

Sheckley says the customer base for the weekend sports strategy consists primarily of people with roots in the British Isles – “a few Australians and New Zealanders, but mainly Brits and the Irish.”

Folks from the West Indies, India and Pakistan figure prominently in the audience for cricket, available in Canada on the ATN Cricket Plus digital channel launched in February 2007 and available from Shaw, Rogers, Bell and Telus.

Rogers Sportsnet, meanwhile, counts poker and mixed martial arts (including UFC) among its somewhat outside-the-mainstream offerings.

UFC has seen a phenomenal rise in popularity and now reportedly garners about 10 million buys for each of its pay-per-views.

Rogers Sportsnet has responded to that popularity by snagging a multi-year deal with UFC and this year creating its own weekly MMA Connected show.

“It’s very strong for us, what can I say,” says Dave Akande, Sportsnet’s vice-president of content. “We’re the network that has taken a stand with regard to UFC programming.”

You can find Sportsnet’s programming schedule for the next six weeks online.

Pay-per-view provider Shaw Direct has a monthly Sports Planner available for download and printout at the business section of its website.