Sports Capital Grants – The Ten Presenters

By Sean O'Connor

My last few pieces on this blog (here and here) have focused on the distribution of Ireland’s sports capital grant funding over the period 2002-2015. We’ve examined the breakdown in terms of inequality; nationally, regionally and also amongst different types of sports. Today’s piece will delve further into the distribution of capital grants, utilising the share amongst the deciles to highlight how much income is received by the bottom, as well as top ten percent.

Deciles are a simple way to measure income inequality within a country. Simply put they can be utilised to examine how much of total income in a country/region is earned by those in the lowest wage earning groups and those in the highest wage earning bracket. The deciles split the population into equal groups of ten and look at the share of income within each group. To begin Figure 1 provides the breakdown of the deciles over the entire period.

Figure 1 indicates clubs who received grants of €6,000 or less would be grouped into the lowest decile, whereas clubs who received grants in excess of €150,000 would be in the top. Given the total number of clubs who received funding during the period was 7,615; each group or decile consists of circa 761 recipients or sports clubs. Interestingly from examining Figure 1 the bottom 761 clubs who received grants of less than €6,000 over the period, accounted for 0.5% of the total cumulative share of awards given out. Conversely, the top ten percent of recipients accounted for 41% of the total value of grants awarded over the period. In other words, in total, 761 sports organisations received circa €231,000,000 worth of funding between them, or on average €312,022 per recipient. Figure 1 would point to the fact much of funding distributed over the period is concentrated in a number of large grants given to a small number of clubs. Given this, it’s also worthwhile to examine how this distribution alters from year to year. Therefore, Table 1 examines the distribution amongst the deciles from each period.

Table 1 presents information of the distribution of sports capital grants per year and across deciles. The row signified by N refers to the number of grants given out to individual clubs during the period, while the row marked value refers to the total amount funding given in that year. So in 2002, 837 individual grants were given out with a total value of €75,400,000. Interestingly, the cumulative share of grants for the bottom ten percent of clubs never once reached one percent. Contrast this to the top ten percent of clubs who in any given year received close to two thirds of the available funding. In particular years this distribution was even more extreme. For instance, in 2003 circa 61 clubs received 42% of the overall funding available (€51,900,000), whereas in 2008 68 clubs took over half the funding available in that particular year, while the top 1% in 2008 took 18.55%. It’s also interesting to look at share of funding of the top ten percent across different counties. Figure 2 plots this for each county over the entire period.

The red line in Figure 2 denotes the share of grants received by the top ten percent of recipients nationally over the period, whereas each blue bar highlights the share of the top ten percent within each county over the period. We notice five counties are above the national average over the period in terms of the share of grants received by the top ten percent of clubs. These regions are Waterford, Offaly, Limerick, Dublin and Cork, with the impact being most pronounced in Limerick. While such an analysis sheds further light on the distribution of Irish sports capital grants, a follow up piece on this blog will provide a breakdown of the distribution of grants across the deciles for a number of different sporting codes.