All three of the main national newspapers carry photography from the Dublin All Ireland Ladies Football Champions on their front pages this morning. This is something that would have been seen as strange coming off the back of the Men’s All Ireland Final only a decade ago but in 2020 it is a sign of the growing ‘normalisation’ of Women’s sports coverage across mainstream coverage.
At different points during the year, we have dipped into media coverage of the Irish Times, Irish Independent and Irish Examiner, all of which deliver an exceptionally high standard of sports coverage.
Today we have compared the relative coverage given across all three to the two All Ireland Finals held over the weekend, the coverage of the four Irish provinces in the Heineken Champions Cup and soccer coverage from across England, Scotland and Europe.
There were other sporting stories in each but for the purposes of this comparison, we have only focused on those four areas.
The Men’s All Ireland Final from Saturday is the largest of the four securing between 32.5 per cent and 37.1 per cent of the comparative coverage.
The Women’s game gets almost two thirds the level of coverage of the Men’s in the Irish Examiner, just over half in the Irish Independent and just under half in the Irish Times.
Rugby presents the greatest variance with 26.6 per cent of the comparative coverage in the Irish Times but only 14.2 per cent in the Irish Independent.
There is a mirror of that in soccer with 28.3 per cent in the Independent and 21.8 per cent in the Times. The Examiner splits the pair on both sports.
Sport for Business Partners
