Rugby’s Aviva era looks set to be an expensive one
29 August 2010 By Tom McGurk If the Irish Times letters page is anything to go by, the price of rugby international tickets for the November matches at the Aviva Stadium has stirred up a whirlwind of controversy.
Patrons will be sold tickets for the four games -South Africa, New Zealand, Argentina and Samoa -only as a single package, and this has raised the hackles in suburbia.
The packages will cost the following: premium level (€425); stand (€340); schools tickets (€135).This represents a huge increase on the cost of tickets for matches played at Croke Park last season, with even the price of school tickets raised by 25 per cent.
Responding to the public outcry and the spate of angry letters, the IRFU issued a statement defending its position.
It stressed that it was a non-profit-making organisation - all its surplus being invested back into the game -and that it was the only fully professional sports body in Ireland.
Ironically, on the same page of its website, it continues its campaign to ‘Save Irish Rugby’ from minister Eamon Ryan’s proposals to ensure that games currently scheduled on pay TV only are also offered at market rates to terrestrial broadcasters.
So far, the IRFU has achieved about 3,000 Facebook ‘supporters’ for its campaign, but one wonders how many will now be interested?
Having paid nearly €100 for each rugby international at the Aviva, will they still be enthusiastic enough to continue to hand over about €750 per annum to Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Sports channel?
Fortunately for the fans, all the Irish internationals at the Aviva for the next three years, at least, will be free-to-air on RTE. But the ticket prices strategy is hardly a surprise.
The costs of maintaining an international team and a panel of world-class players in international rugby increase all the time. In many ways, the IRFU has performed something of a financial miracle to date, but the Aviva era now raises significant financial questions.
At the outset, the IRFU was unfortunate that Bertie Ahern’s ambitions for a ‘Bertie Bowl’ coincided with -and indeed confounded- its plans for a new stadium. Both the Bertie Bowl and the mooted Eircom Stadium for football succeeded only in delaying the IRFU’s plans for almost a decade of valuable, and subsequently expensive, years.
The new stadium, finally opened in recent months, could actually have opened for the 2000millenniumyear were it not for the spate of stadium fantasies.
Looking back, and considering the new financial realities, there must be a significant concern that, in the end, the decision to rebuild at Lansdowne Road rather than to go for the option of a new stadium on a green field site -o n land it already owned near theM50 in west Dublin -was not taken. In retrospect, the financial arguments for moving are compelling.
In a nutshell, the Aviva is too small for where the Irish professional game is now -in deed, almost 30,000 too small to maintain the numbers and ticket prices that, for example, Croke Park had offered. It is hard not to argue that, were the upcoming autumn internationals being held at Croke Park,100,000 extra cheaper tickets could have been sold.
Given Lansdowne’s location, it must have been obvious from the outset that planning permission to build any larger than the existing size stadium was not going to be allowed.
The result can now be seen at the Aviva where the Havelock Square end has virtually no seats and is a glass canopy to allow light to reach houses at the rear. In years to come, that glass wall may become a hugely expensive compromise.
(I don’t know if the kind of temporary seating now used at the RDS would be permitted there on international days.)
The west Dublin green field site would have provided the opportunity to build to 80,000, could have provided car parks and a Luas linkup and would have been readily accessible off our new motorway network.
Indeed, had it been roofed, too, we would have had the largest concert venue in the country.
Even better, the IRFU would then have been disposing of the Lansdowne site at the very height of the Celtic tiger property prices, when Ballsbridge had become one of the most valuable development land sites in the world.
The sale back then might even have totally financed the new stadium.
Now, to make the Aviva ticket crisis worse, the naming rights sale to Aviva Insurance has raised an estimated €40 million over ten years but, importantly, it has prevented the larger games being switched to Croke Park which is now available.
Calculate the loss of, say, 30,000 tickets per game in four major internationals over a ten-year period and that comes to 1.2 million potential tickets unsold.
Even at current prices that’s a huge loss, far in excess of the profits made from the Aviva naming deal.
So, given how the IRFU has finally cut its cloth, its new ticket prices structure may not be fair - but are undeniably needed. Professional rugby is becoming more and more expensive.
Ironically, had the IRFU known the extent to which the Croke Park era would boost rugby attendance when it made its decision to stay at Lansdowne, I’m sure it would have taken the greenfield route.
But what’s done is done and, as more and more commercial money and television is poured into the game - especially in France and the southern hemisphere -th e prices at Aviva may well have to increase even more.
Ironically, it is Rupert Murdoch’s television revenue that is inflating the game financially worldwide to such an extent that to watch it, either at home or in the stadium, is going to become more and more expensive.
I fear we are in the same Murdochian economic tide that has already reduced professional football in the English Premier League to an increasingly meaningless three-ring (sometimes two-ring) circus.
Rugby will go the same way unless those controlling the world game take action. But given that they too are beneficiaries, how likely is that?
The reality that few in the rugby world seem to understand is that, if not checked, pay-TV revenues will unleash an inevitable economic tide that will eventually submerge smaller unions, such as Ireland.
Yes, they do provide economic support in the short term, but in the long run, they are part of an economic inflationary process that could wreck the future prospects of the game in Ireland.
So, after €190 million of taxpayers’ money being spent on the new stadium, and given the new ticket prices, what have all those politicians who so avidly opposed Eamon Ryan’s free-to-air proposals got to say now?
Tom McGurk anchors RTE TV’s international rugby coverage
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