EY CFO Outlook: Building strong financial foundations for professional rugby with Thelma O’Driscoll, CFO, IRFU

In this episode of the EY CFO Outlook podcast, Thelma O’Driscoll, CFO of the IRFU joins host Jonathan Healy to talk about her diverse career path, her passion for growing male and female rugby from the grassroots up, and how the role of CFO enables her to create a strong and sustainable financial foundation for the game.

Thelma O’Driscoll’s journey into the rugby world was not a direct one. Starting out in the family business, Thelma went on to work in various finance functions across computer manufacturing (Dell), telecommunications, and professional services. This diverse financial background has proven to be a solid foundation for her current role as CFO of the IRFU. 

And diversity has been a strong theme during Thelma’s time in the male-dominated world of professional rugby. Having been the only female around the leadership table when she first joined in 2016, the organisation has since made huge strides, with 40% of the IRFU Union Committee now comprising female colleagues. Thelma is also very passionate about growing women’s rugby and increasing investment in it. 

They also discuss:

Financial Strategy - The IRFU is a not-for-profit organisation, meaning all revenue is reinvested into the game. Over half of the IRFU’s €90m income is distributed to provinces, clubs and grassroots rugby.

Challenges in Sports Finance - The IRFU's income varies in cycles, and careful management keeps national teams and grassroots rugby stable. Thelma explains why tough decisions are needed to invest wisely and control spending in order to maintain sustainability.

Growing Women’s Rugby - Women’s rugby is experiencing rapid growth and the IRFU are committed to grow the game further and increase investment. This strategic plan includes decentralising the current model and moving to four contracted provincial women’s teams. New sponsors like Goodfella’s Pizza are investing in women’s rugby, with more to come.

The Future of Irish Rugby - At the moment Ireland is at the pinnacle of world rugby, but sustaining its position requires careful financial planning. With a debt-free model, Thelma’s goal is to strengthen its finances with modern systems to support all levels of Irish rugby.

Transcript

George Deegan, Partner, Assurance and CFO Programme Partner Sponsor, EY: 

Welcome to the EY CFO Outlook Podcast.

In this series we feature some of Ireland’s leading CFOs - sharing interesting perspectives on a range of topics, from driving growth in their business to leading major finance transformation.

I’m George Deegan, a partner and sponsor of EY’s CFO Agenda programme. 

In this episode, we welcome Thelma O’Driscoll of the IRFU, the national governing body for Rugby Union in Ireland.

Thelma talks about her diverse career path, her passion for growing male and female rugby from the grassroots up, and how the role of CFO enables her to create a strong and sustainable financial foundation for the professional game.

Jonathan, over to you..

Jonathan: George. Thank you. I'm delighted to be joined by the CFO of the Irish Rugby Football Union, Thelma O'Driscoll. You're very welcome to the podcast.

Thelma: Thanks, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your role in the IRFU.

Thelma: Okay. So I am the CFO of the IRFU and I joined there in September 2023. So I'm well settled at this point. I did work in rugby before I joined the IRFU, so I had some experience. In 2016, I joined the Six Nations, which was responsible for not only running the Six Nations, but also for the British and Irish Lions and the Pro12 as it was then, or URC as it is now. So I did bring a lot of kind of international rugby experience to my role at the IRFU, which was very helpful when I started, but prior to then I had no rugby experience whatsoever. I should say I'm a Cork woman, so I'm a Munster fan.

Jonathan: Excellent.

Thelma: But I'm living now in the heart of Leinster territory with three Leinster fans, my husband and two children. But to be fair to them, they do cheer for Munster when Leinster aren't playing, which I'm very grateful for.

Jonathan: Take the small victories as they emerge. Your background though, was it always sport before you kind of became so immersed in rugby?

Thelma: No. I started my working life in a family business. My father and his brother started a business while I was still in college. And so I got drafted into that to help them launch that business. And after that, I worked in a range of industries. I worked in computer manufacturing with Dell, and I worked in telecommunications and professional services. So I had no background in rugby whatsoever. But I suppose, you know, when a job like the Six Nations comes on your desk, you know, you really sit up. Everybody knows the Six Nations, whether you're a sporting fan or not. It's rugby's greatest championship for a good reason.

Jonathan: But if rugby fans in the family, what was their reaction when you told them you were taking this job with the IRFU. They must have thought they were going to get tickets for everything.

Thelma: Yeah, they still do, but there isn't a magic pot of tickets, just so you know. I think my brother said, you know, that must be one of the greatest CFO jobs in the country. And I think I'd have to agree with him. It's a great place to work.

Jonathan: Accountancy, in many ways, is universal. It's all about numbers, and it's about making things add up. But accountancy when it comes to sport is very, very different. How did you find the difference?

Thelma: You know accounting the principles are the same as we know. I think there's a couple of things that are really different. I suppose what surprised me the most was the range of stakeholders that you have to think about. You know, you're used to thinking about products and customers and, you know, board members and all that. But in the IRFU, we have a much greater lot of stakeholders. You know, we've got the fans, we've got the media, You've got the volunteers up and down the country, coaches and players. So it's a very, very wide range. And you know we are a not for profit. So our job is to, you know, maximise our income but to invest it all. And as a national governing body, you know, our remit is far broader than say the national teams. You know, people think of the IRFU and they think of mainly the senior teams, but we're responsible for rugby on the island of Ireland. So that's not just about high performance. And you know those pathways. It's all the way down to the grassroots. And you know the five year old taking to the pitch for the first time and the facilities they need and all of that. So it's a much broader remit than you'd expect.

Jonathan: I mean, it must have been quite the learning curve. I'm not sure whether you were thinking about the five year old lining out for the first time when you took the job, but how quickly did you learn that? You know, this is very unlike any other organisation I've worked in.

Thelma: It's pretty quick, I suppose, coming into the IRFU because I understood the revenue sources very, very well. Having had a background with Six Nations, URC and Lions, I suppose my focus was really on the expenditure side and understanding that. So, you know, probably I think it was my second week in the job, I set off to start meeting the provinces and understanding where does the money go? Like over half of our cost base and it's about 90 million. Over half of it goes to the provinces and the clubs and the grassroots. That's where a lot of it goes. So I needed to understand all of that expenditure and what the challenges were. So I suppose that's where I spent most of the time learning. It's very important to understand the whole ecosystem. You can't focus on, you know, the national teams and high performance. Our remit is much, much bigger than that.

Jonathan: Family is very important to you. You seem to credit the family business a lot with, I suppose, your grounding in business. How has there been a correlation between what you were doing at home with your family and what you're doing now?

Thelma: I suppose it was unplanned, but when you work in a family business, I guess I come from parents that have a very strong work ethic, and I suppose I have carried that through my working life. I'd never say I was the most talented, but I think hard work takes you a long way.

Jonathan: You probably had no choice in the family business, I guess.

Thelma: Yeah, exactly. You know and when you're in a family business, particularly a smaller one, you have to roll up your sleeves and do whatever needs to be done on whatever day of the week or hour of the night. You know, you've just no choice. And I suppose sport is a kind of a seven day a week job, too. So there's a similarity there. But, you know, when people are making business decisions, they often say, you know, think of you spending your own money or think of it as your own business. Well, I did that, you know, early in my working career. So I have acute knowledge of decisions I'm making, having a direct influence on my family's financial well-being. So I think I've carried that feeling. Through my working life and and, you know, I probably felt in multinationals, I was too far away from the decision making. But I love that the IRFU, it's kind of back to the roots of making decisions that have an important impact.

Jonathan: But you've seen that connection. I mean you've talked about it already with the volunteers around the country, like everything else, yes you want the senior teams to succeed, but I'm guessing the lessons that you learned when you were running the family business was, we have to make these decisions now, or else we won't have a business. I mean, that must be still to your core.

Thelma: Oh, absolutely. To my core, it certainly is.

Jonathan: Tell me a little bit about your first impressions of rugby when you went in, because you joined what was the Pro12 then. It's grown since. I'd imagine it was a very male dominated world. Was that a challenge?

Thelma: I wouldn't say it was a challenge. It was definitely more male dominated than any of the other industries I'd worked in previously. You know, it was usual for me back in back in 2016 to go out for dinner with the Six Nations Council and the executive team, so that would be 16 men and me.

Jonathan: The only woman?

Thelma: Yeah, the only woman, probably on the younger end of the spectrum too. And I'm a very petite person, so I'm sure people were wondering who this tiny little woman is with all these rugby types at dinner. But I have to say, my experience has always been extremely positive. And, you know, I've always felt supported and respected and heard and, you know, things are very different now in such a short space of time. You know, if you look around the table of the senior leadership team at the IRFU, you know, there's a lot of women on that. And I'm very proud of the IRFU reaching 40% gender balance on their union committee the year before last. So that's wonderful.

Jonathan: But when you went in, first of all, you were reporting to a board because there is a board in the IRFU as there would be any organisation. Was that all male?

Thelma: No it's not. There's a good diversity of men and women on it. And I think that diversity really adds to the decisions that are being made.

Jonathan: Is that part of the journey that the organization is on? And we're going to talk in a little bit about how the sport is changing. Is it changing because we have that board makeup, that management makeup that, you know, it's not all about the boys anymore, as it might have been perceived in the 80s.

Thelma: I think that the biggest change we've experienced or are experiencing at the moment is the explosion of women's sport, which is great for every aspect of society. So yeah, it's huge.

Jonathan: When you went in there, did you have a false perception of what you were going to be dealing with? I mean, you went in there not knowing too much about rugby when you joined. Did anything surprise you?

Thelma: I don't think so. I think it was the range of stakeholders and how broad the remit of the organisation is. But I think having worked in rugby previously with the other tournaments, it probably didn't surprise me as much as people thought it might do.

Jonathan: So how long have you been involved in rugby at this point, Thelma?

Thelma: I joined rugby in 2016.

Jonathan: 2016. So it's during that time that the sport has changed an awful lot. What have you seen in terms of that change?

Thelma: I think the biggest change is the explosion of women's sport generally and the growing popularity of women's rugby. You know, we've huge ambitions to grow this game, particularly the women's side of it. You know, the men have the benefit of 150 years worth of history, and the women's sport is quite new, but we really want to accelerate the growth of change in that game.

Jonathan: When you saw that change happening, like everything else, the women's game had to grow at a rapid pace. As you said, 150 years of experience on the men's side. What does the women's game need to do now to get to the same level, or even close to the level of the men's sport?

Thelma: Well, we've huge ambition for the women's game, and we outlined that in our strategic plan, which we launched last year, and one of those ambitions is to move from two contracted provincial teams to four contracted provincial teams, which is going to take significant investment. And we have some great partners on board in the men's side of the game, and they have now started investing in the women's game too. So partners like Canterbury, AON, Vodafone, Energia and you know, there's some great conversations now going on with more brands as we kind of move towards this step change in women's sport and moving to those four contracted teams. And just recently we launched our first women's only partner, Goodfella's Pizzas. And I think brands are starting to see that, you know, they want to be part of this step change. So I think watch this space. We're going to be announcing more partners shortly.

Jonathan: The fact that the men's game turned professional in our lifetime, that was a huge sea change at the time. But I don't know anyone who was talking about women's rugby at that point. Now you've got clubs up and down the length and breadth of the island. You talk about four provincial teams. We need to have clubs that have dedicated girls teams as well, and there is a challenge in financing the women's game because it can't all come from the IRFU.

Thelma: Yeah, we've invested a lot to build the product and bring it to where it is so that it's investable for partners. You know, we spent 8.3 million in our last financial year, and I think we'll spend 9 million in this financial year, and probably even more as we head into the Women's World Cup later in the year. So we certainly need the brands now to come out and support us and fans too, you know, we're finding that more and more fans are coming to the games. And, you know, it's wonderful when you go to those matches. You see whole families and groups of friends at these matches.

Jonathan: I've been to a few of those games across different codes. It's a different experience, isn't it? It's a very enjoyable experience, and one that I can safely say that my daughter gets a huge amount out of.

Thelma: Yeah. Mine too. It's very warm and family friendly and inviting, and because it's competitively priced, it's conducive to family days out and even just groups of friends. You see groups of women going to these matches and enjoying it too. And it's really wonderful to see that.

Jonathan: And we have a Women's World Cup coming up this year as well.

Thelma: Indeed, yes, I'm really looking forward to that. And New Zealand are in our pool, so that will be a very exciting rematch.

Jonathan: Fingers crossed we get out of the quarterfinal. We won't go back there.

Thelma: No.

Jonathan: The other thing I wanted to ask you about, given that you are the CFO, the cost of elite sport being so significant, you know, everyone thinks about wages. It's not as big a thing in rugby as it is in soccer, but moving teams from A to B, making sure they're staying in the right hotels, training grounds, down to the food that they're being given. I mean, you must see some stuff coming across your desk.

Thelma: I do, but I suppose it didn't surprise me because having worked with the British and Irish Lions, you know, that's a small core team. And after a tour, you know, it retracts down to that core team. And then over the course of four years, it builds up in advance of a tour, but they don't have the benefit of the infrastructure that a union would have. So it has to buy everything in. So I suppose I had seen the cost of all of that, so I guess it didn't surprise me then when I went into, you know, the IRFU, what the cost would be. But, you know, every team wants to win. That's the point. You have to be competitive and you have to invest to gain the fine margins. And, you know, we owe it to the volunteers who are giving their time, and we owe it to the fans who are buying all the tickets. You know, we need to be competitive.

Jonathan: But at the same time, you've got an organisation that's hell bent on success no matter what stage it is. Whether it's the head of the women's team, head of the men's team, Munster, Leinster, Connacht, Ulster and they turn round and say, we have to have this Thelma. If we don't have this now on your head, be it if we don't win, are you the person who says no or who has to say no sometimes?

Thelma: If there was a downside to the job of being CFO, it's saying no quite a bit. You know, sometimes I do feel like the merchant of doom, but, you know, it's about robust reporting and forecasting, and people have to understand that we operate in cycles. So while we might have a deficit in a year, you know, that's not the end of the world because it's usually planned for. But likewise, when we have a surplus in any given year, that doesn't mean we can expand. So, you know, we have a two year cycle of the Six Nations, a four year world Rugby cycle. But probably more importantly, we have a ten year cycle with our ten year ticket holders, most of whom pay in advance. And it underpins our financial model, and that's what's in our bank account. And so we have to have to achieve balance across those cycles. And probably the part of my job I enjoy the most is, you know, explaining all that complex financial data and forecasting in a very succinct, simple way so people can understand it. And, you know, I find when people understand and you explain why you're saying no, you know, it eases the burden.

Jonathan: The challenge for you, though, is that sport, like everything else in life, is becoming more and more expensive. You've had to make difficult decisions around ticket prices like every other sporting organisation, as the sport gets bigger and bigger and those demands increase. Is it going to be harder to keep a steady hand on the tiller?

Thelma: I don't think so, because I'm very clear in my head about achieving balance over those cycles. And, you know, we are blessed to have a strong balance sheet and no debt, and we want to keep it that way. We have to achieve that balance and we can only ever spend what we make. So we have to keep a steady ship. And that is the crucial point of my job. So that is what I'm doing day in and day out. And, you know, my job is to make sure that the IRFU is fit for purpose for the years ahead and survives and supports all of rugby throughout the nation. And, you know, we do have times of, say, lumpy income where it's going up and down, but we don't want to be cancelling programmes, you know, from one year to the next. We want consistency. So that's what is a key part of my role.

Jonathan: It's the only international sport where team sport, where Ireland is at the pinnacle of the game. It's incredible. Ireland were the number one team jostling with New Zealand for that position in recent years. You know we are at the height, the zenith probably right now where income streams are reasonably steady, but you are a couple of bad matches away from perhaps interest being lost and you speak to your colleagues in soccer and I'm sure they'll tell you all about this when the jersey sales aren't as good and the ticket returns aren't as good. Where does the IRFU go in terms of structure? I mean, do you have to allow for the rainy day? And where do you see the IRFU going from here?

Thelma: Yeah. We're always mindful of rainy days. And, you know, Covid laid it bare for most of us very quickly. So constantly looking at the horizon and forecasting. And you know it's not all on my shoulders. We do have a very strong governance structure that supports us, a committee structure with a very impressive calibre of people on it. So, you know, with some of the best minds in the country looking at this and making sure that we're supported and making the right decisions, not just in the short term, but for the longer term as well.

Jonathan: Is that what you want your legacy to be? Not that you're retiring or anything like that, but if you ever choose to move on that, you know, you can look back and say, well, at least I put the structures in place for good and bad.

Thelma: It is. I have a very clear vision in my head, and I think having that vision is paramount, and it helps you say no in the short term when you have to. But I'm very clear on where I want it to be when I leave. I want to be able to look back and say it's stronger financially now than when I started, and I want to make sure that the organization has all the, you know, the systems and processes that are befitting a modern day organization and so that it will be better for all the stakeholders in the future.

Jonathan: I'm listening to what you're saying, and I'm fascinated because when I use bring my son to rugby to training, it was inevitably raining and standing on the sideline looking at the volunteers and it couldn't be further removed from the IRFU in my head because that was just him and his mates running round playing the sport.  But I get the impression from speaking to you that that's as important to you as it is to see the Six Nations teams running out over the course of the next few weeks.

Thelma: It absolutely is, I suppose. You know, I think about my own son playing rugby. I have a niece and nephew who are six and seven years old who are starting in their rugby journey. And I'm thinking about, you know, what is the pathway for them to someday, maybe taking to the field in the Aviva with a green jersey because, you know, we have a very successful men's team. We have a successful women's team. The under 20 are all doing well. But you know, we don't get there by accident. You know, the pathways from that five year old all the way up is crucial to us having successful teams in the future. So, you know, we have to get the balance right. It's not just all about high performance. We have to make sure our volunteers, our clubs, and our provinces are supported. They are as equally important to us as you know, how well we'll do in the Six Nations.

Jonathan: Rapid fire round to finish up. One question I'm going to have to amend because it's a little bit slanted given that we're speaking to the IRFU. First question though, Apple or Android?

Thelma: Apple!

Jonathan: Books are e-reader?

Thelma: Oh, books.

Jonathan: Cash are contactless?

Thelma: Contactless.

Jonathan: As I said, I'm taking rugby off the list for this question because...

Thelma: Oh no.

Jonathan: If you had no rugby, would it be GAA or soccer?

Thelma: My son is a big soccer fan. I have to admit.

Jonathan: So you're going with him for soccer?

Thelma: I'm going with him.

Jonathan: What advice would you give yourself? Your 18 year old self?

Thelma: Oh, wow. I think I would say enjoy the journey. I think life happens during the journey. It's not all about the destination, so enjoy the journey.

Jonathan: If you weren't a CFO, what would you be doing?

Thelma: I suppose my interest is very much business. So I would be working in business at a strategic level in some capacity, either running businesses or investing in businesses, or maybe sitting on boards or something like that. So not very far from what I'm doing is the answer.

Jonathan: But you'd still be on the sideline, supporting rugby teams?

Thelma: Absolutely, yes. And hoarse from doing so.

Jonathan: Thelma O' Driscoll of the IRFU - thank you for joining us on the podcast.

Thelma: Thank you Jonathan.

Jonathan: And that is it for another episode of the EY CFO Outlook podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll catch you on the next one.