Meet Sinéad Galvin – the sports agent helping Irish athletes navigate the minefield of sponsorship ahead of Paris 2024

Sports agent Sinéad Galvin came across a more traditional metric for judging the popularity of the recent European Athletics Championships when it was a main topic of conversation at a family wedding. The chat is generally dominated by Gaelic games and soccer, but this time, it was the athletes and the medal rush in Rome.

It struck Galvin just how much athletics had reached beyond the sport’s core following. It would be easy to imagine the success of the Irish team in Rome – including two relay medals – would pull the lever on sponsors lining up to be part of this attractive story in the build-up to next month’s Paris Olympics.

That’s not quite the reality for many reasons, including – as Galvin points out – Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter, which deals with what athletes can commercially engage in during the ‘Games Period’, from July 18, 2024, to August 13, 2024.

You might not find it too surprising that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is particularly protective of its brand and so it goes. Under Rule 40, there are guidelines like how athletes can only give one thank-you message to a personal non-Olympic partner on social media during this ‘Games Period’ while social media posts cannot reference how a product or service “enhanced their performance”.

Rule 40 also restricts new sponsors from coming on board just before the Olympics because, largely speaking, all sponsors had to be registered on a designated online platform by the start of last week.

This is a rule Galvin has been familiar with since she set up her agency Galvin Sports Management (galvinsportsmanagement.ie) nearly eight years ago.

The Dubliner saw “a gap in the market” for Olympic and Paralympic athletes to be represented and her stable of stars includes Tokyo Paralympic gold medallist Ellen Keane, world champion gymnast Rhys McClenaghan and athletics stars like European 1500m champion Ciara Mageean as well as European relay silver medallists Sophie Becker and Phil Healy.

This is the time of year sponsors generally look towards the following year, so getting a quick buck for the bang of an excellent Europeans for her athletes is not how it necessarily works.

“I think it is a great window for them in terms of other opportunities, but I know, in the commercial world, finding the right brands that are going to activate in the right way takes time,” Galvin said. “So similar to Jermey’s patience as a coach, I’ve learned to be more patient on the commerciality of athletes. They will reap the benefits of this but not as quickly as people might perceive externally.”

The Jeremy that Galvin refers to is her husband, Jeremy Lyons, who is one of the founders of the Dublin Sprint group and coach to Sophie Becker.

Galvin’s role as an agent and her understanding of her clients comes with a number of viewing points, not least that she used to be a renowned underage sprinter herself.

Galvin sees the importance of athletes being themselves when it comes to those moments when they talk to the nation through their post-race TV interviews, like at the Europeans, which appeared to engage the public as much as their track performances.

“One of the things I’m always looking for – performance is one thing – but personality is another. I would be aware that the people I would sign up have the potential to have that level of mixed zone interview,” Galvin added. “I would never before a championship say to them, ‘This is the way you need to be’. They’re just being 100pc themselves and showing what they’re like. But also that level of enthusiasm. You just cannot beat that kind of raw emotion.

“People that buy into Ciara have bought into knowing that it’s not been a straight road to success, that it’s been up and down and the potential was always there to be the European champion.”

With stars like McClenaghan, this is the point in the build-up to the Olympics where Galvin says she fades into the background. McClenaghan has gold star potential all about him despite the heartbreak of three years ago with a mistake in the final of the pommel horse.

“The difficult part of being an athlete is businesses buy into you for a business perspective, so sometimes they can walk away when performances don’t go as planned, but thankfully for Rhys, the brands he was working with could still see he absolutely had huge potential. They also understood how eloquently he spoke after.

“I don’t know how he did it after that final and he could reframe it and say, ‘Well, hang on a minute here, I’m the first Irish gymnast to make an Olympic final. I achieved that. There’s more to come, but I’m still walking away here knowing I did achieve that’.”

It’s that kind of patience that could pay off in Paris.