The Pitch: Asda deliver fatal blow to the Conor McGregor drinks empire

Late on Tuesday afternoon British supermarket chain Asda detonated a powerful and most devastating blow to Conor McGregor’s Forged Irish Stout brand, pushing the company to the brink of collapse with the potential loss of 50 jobs.

After two days of communications with the retail giant its head of press and corporate Elliott Lancaster informed The Pitch that the end had come.

“I can confirm that we have removed Forged Irish Stout from sale in store and online and have made the supplier aware of this decision,” he said.

The news signalled a potential halving of all production at McGregor’s Glasnevin Brewery – following on from the verdict from a jury last Friday that he raped Dublin woman Nikita Hand at the Beacon Hotel in 2018.

Asda was the single most important retailer globally for Forged, and was the first significant international chain to step up and remove the product from its shelves, obliterating the business just before the key Christmas market.

The news came just as McGregor’s side was beginning to consider that the boycott called for by Clíona Saidléar, Rape Crisis Network Ireland‘s (RCNI) executive director, would be contained to the island of Ireland.

That would have been significant in itself, but only worth 10% of global sales of product.

Then Asda happened, and everything changed — not least for the brewers, delivery drivers, operational and office staff at the business, which is now on the brink of collapse.

Achieving shelf space across Asda’s 1,200 UK supermarkets and convenience shops was an enormous strategic success for Forged when it debuted with the store in August 2023 – initially through 350 of the chain’s shops.

In Glasnevin, the news sent shockwaves throughout the company, more so than any of the announcements by Irish retailers that day, where a host of chains including Eurospar, Costcutter and Carry Out announced a cessation of sales.

A communications blackout by senior management and McGregor himself had seen staff depend on newswires and social media for information, with no formal communications coming from the top since a jury ruled in favour of Nikita Hand’s civil action the previous Friday.

Nikita Hand, who accused Conor McGregor of raping her in a Dublin hotel in December 2018, speaks to the media after winning her civil case for damages against him. Picture: Eamonn Farrell / © RollingNews.ie

While choosing to ignore staff at Forged, McGregor did communicate with his base on social media this week, offering a snarly rebuttal of the jury’s findings and of his victim, vowing to appeal the civil conviction.

While there is nothing but contempt for McGregor, there must be enormous sympathy for staff – many of whom did not choose to work with Conor McGregor – but who were part of the Porterhouse Brewery legacy, when the UFC fighter purchased the facility in April of last year.

The site has produced three million cans to date, according to is own PR earlier this year, but whatever the actual number, the Asda move will have eviscerated demand for product in the most significant way.

With Asda covering the majority of business in Forged’s most important territory, there is now serious doubts the company can survive, as production lines face output and export reductions and orders are cancelled.

Forged makes much noise of its entry to the US and Canadian marketplace but a number of well-placed experts doubt that these numbers are significant, given the extreme difficultly for any non-larger beer brand to break that market, particularly one with no brand tradition or history.

If Forged was a strong, historic legacy brand, run by a Board and Chairman, it would have parted company with McGregor immediately after the Hand verdict, but the Dubliner assumes full control of the company and is not answerable to any stakeholders, least of all, staff.

A sale of the company is also off the table given that the brand is so toxic and intrinsically linked to a sex attacker – deeming it worthless in the eyes of a number of key drinks industry experts.

Around the same time Asda came to its decision another move was made by a McGregor drinks brand which will hit the Dubliner hard financially, perhaps to as much as $10m per year.

News that Proximo will no longer use McGregor’s “name and likeness” in future marketing for the Proper No. Twelve whiskey brand is both a blow to him and to the Mexican drinks giant which paid €120m for the company in 2021.

In a side deal Proximo created an additional revenue stream for Conor McGregor by signing up the fighter for his ongoing marketing presence around the product, a deal which we understand is propped up with future bonus payments based on revenue and sales.

That total add-on agreement may be worth as much as $100m, but Proximo declined to go into detail despite repeated attempts to contact the firm around the contract, or even if it intended to continue to pay the MMA athlete his retainer.

Some of these retail chains which withdrew McGregor product – including Tesco which carried the Proper Twelve whiskey brand – will also review their own due diligence, which encouraged them to carry product by such a toxic force, in the first place.

Conor Byrne who hosts the That’s What I Call Marketing podcast has some sympathy for retailers.

“It’s a very interesting one,” says Byrne.

“Let’s take the retailer that stocks the product – this, of course, was not part of their plan and comes completely unexpected, but that’s the risk with brands with celebrity associations.”

For Conor McGregor, what happens next, will greatly depend on what happens in the US.

There is mounting speculation that he will fight YouTuber Jake Paul next year, and it’s unlikely that a sex assault will stand in the way of such a match-up — particularly with such a base audience.

Paul recently fought Mike Tyson in Texas in a fight which was met with derision from across the boxing world.

Mike Tyson, don’t forget, is a convicted rapist, who spent three years in prison for the 1992 attack on Desiree Washington, a then 18-year-old and he is facing a civil charge from another woman who claims she too was sexually assaulted by Tyson in the early 1990s.

Since his rape conviction Tyson went on to claim: “When I went to prison I had $15m, when I came out I must have had $300-400m — I’m signing contracts in prison.”

That was before the Me Too movement where such appalling abuse of women is no longer accepted or tolerated, although in the fight game standards are not so high — but we’ll see.

We contacted Conor McGregor and Forged Irish Stout but both declined to comment.

Lions dip toes in Great Barrier Reef in charity partnership

Ahead of their tour Down Under next year, the British and Irish Lions have signed up with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation to help with the protection and conservation of biodiversity in Australia.

It said in a statement that the partnership “offers a vital platform to raise awareness and funds for the conservation of the Great Barrier Reef, one of the most iconic ecosystems on the planet”.

The agreement comes in collaboration with Rugby Australia and seeks to bring attention of more than 1,600 species of shark, dophins, whales and six of the world’s seven species of marine turtles - making it the largest living structure on earth.

The weird world of election promises

It’s general election time and The Pitch was a keen observer of the sports debate on Premier Sports on Monday and an astonishing promise from outgoing Minister for Sport Thomas Byrne.

Byrne, who has steadfastly refused to invest funding in academy football structures throughout his junior ministerial role at the Department of Sport came up with an ingenious way of promising something he has already failed to deliver on.

“We will fund football academies – full stop – in the Fianna Fáil party,” said the former Minister of State.

The fact that Fianna Fáil had the chance to fund academies during its term in office did not escape most stakeholders and observers.

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