Qualifier admission prices turning people away???

[snoopdog]

Was at Tullamore tonight, terraces 20 euro stand 25 euro.
Who regulates these prices for qualifier games. Is there not a set price that the gaa set out at start of season or do each county board make up their own prices, if so im not surprised Tullamore is such a nice ground by the admissionprices.
It really left a bad taste being charged so much in to a qualifier to watch a game played by amateur footballers.
I have been at premier league games and paid less.
No wonder crowds are so poor this year.
Admission prices are turning more people away than the fact that so many games are now on tv.

snoopdog, what would consider a fair price? e10? e15? i certainly take your point, esp in todays environment - i paid e20 into the munster final and i thought it was good value considering the price of a pint these days

For a qualifier game yes 10e 15 for seating reasonable price.
I wouldnt mind so much paying 25 for a provincial final. Amateur sport in basic grounds does not deserve the price that the association are charging. Croker is a wrld class stadium and they get away with the prices there but imagine how sickening it was to be  charged 25 euro into Tullamore last night. Lovely ground by GAA standards but its mostly just concrete terrace.

[thewobbler]

Price isn't the issue so much as value for money.

By and large, back door games feel like a 'B' Championship.

Some of the teams are in shellshock after their Provincial exits, others in turmoil. Some line-ups are experimental, others full of players who have already got flights arranged for America. Some teams have either stopped training or are doing so with dwindling numbers, others are managed by men who just don't have the knowledge of faraway opponents to set up a game plan to suit.

The intensity - the do or die Championship spirit - normally just isn't there.

It takes a certain sort of individual to traipse halfway across Ireland and pay €20 to watch players go through the motions.

[armaghniac]

It takes a certain sort of individual eejit to traipse halfway across Ireland and pay €20 to watch players go through the motions.

Don't be too PC! 

[David McKeown]

With the falling crowds and ever increasing ticket prices. Is it now time to think about ending the qualifiers?  Not saying I would necessarily support that just interested to know the feeling on it

[lynchbhoy]

I think the qualifiers are a good thing.
But in the current economic climate the prices being charged are way too much.
For a single person thats not too bad, but if you have a family then its extortionate.
Even for a single person, it all adds up if you are travelling away to a game like Down to Tullamore or Kildare to Derry.

then the games are on TV- so thats the final fatal blow to anyone thinking of going to watch a live match.
Supporters want to go to games, but people feel like they are being priced out of it.

HQ needs to lower ticket prices next year - as I feel that people have started voting with their feet and staying away.

[Lazer]

The exchange rate is also affecting some of the Northern Supporters

€20 into the game in Tullamore would have equated to about £13/£14 a few years ago - now its closer to £18

The price of the matches is affecting my attendence this year. I haven't actually been to any of Downs Longford game this year - I can't justify spending so much money, especially because its 3 matches, 3 weeks in a row.

Depending on the price and location I will be at the next match!

[johnneycool]

The exchange rate is also affecting some of the Northern Supporters

€20 into the game in Tullamore would have equated to about £13/£14 a few years ago - now its closer to £18

The price of the matches is affecting my attendence this year. I haven't actually been to any of Downs qualifier games this - I can't justify spending so much money, especially because its 3 matches, 3 weeks in a row.

Depending on the price and location I will be at the next match!

£18 in the North will buy you a hell of a lot more  than €20 in the south.

The cost of living has to be taken into account when setting these gates and currently it isn't.

[snoopdog]

It takes a certain sort of individual eejit to traipse halfway across Ireland and pay €20 to watch players go through the motions.

Don't be too PC!

luckily for you, your eejits bowed out last saturday. He He 
But at lest youe 20 euro on sat was into croker for 2 games if you have any interest in hurling.
i suppose its another 20 euro into Breffni this sat, but if Down play as bad as last sat night i wont be going to anymore this year.

[ExiledGael]

Best posting this here, not a bad assessment..


TOM HUMPHRIES

LOCKER ROOM: The causes of the recent collapse in attendances aren't as obvious as is often made out

LET ME say one thing about The Gael. He's a difficult sort to pin down. A tricky cove. Capable on the one hand of improvising a spectacle as unlikely as SluddenGate, which in the native imagination at least partially obscured the entire World Cup.

The Gael himself was quite taken up with discussion and speculation about Sludden coursing and whether it is ethical and fair. His cousins in sport, those who get their nourishment at houses of soccer or places where rugby is practised, viewed the Sluddenectomy business as a confirmation of the worth they had always suspected The Gael being capable of.

For a week The Gael could talk of nothing but the Sluddenisation of his sport, the rights and the wrongs of it and the Corinthian ideal as it translates to Nobber and its hinterlands. And then this week, when presented with a groaning smorgasbord of Gaelic treats, a banquet of good games and interesting matches, The Gael generally turned up his Celtic nose and said, no, thanks very much.

In Croke Park on Saturday people had to reach out their hands to make contact with other fans. In Clones yesterday, God help us, there were gaps on the terraces. And Saturday night's replay in Semple drew just 22,673 souls.

The causes of this collapse aren't as obvious as is often made out. The first reason usually given for the absence of The Gael from his place on the crumbling terraces is economic. Yet if the elasticity of demand for tickets to sporting events were price-related Gaelic Games would fare well being comparatively cheap and good value entertainment, especially if there is a SluddenFest at the end of a game or a shemozzle in the middle of it.

Nope, the reasons for The Gael's disdainful attitude are many and various. For a start, take Croke Park. The novelty has worn off the place as a destination to be seen at regardless of what is happening there. Lansdowne Road (it is now and always has been Lansdowne, we don't have to bow to the tyranny of money all the time, do we?) has gone to the trouble of getting a roof which looks like a Pringles crisp and a sparkling glass edifice which makes it look lovely and inviting, and for a year or two attendances there will be swelled by the grandees who find it to be a suitable backdrop while bigging themselves up.

There are other reasons at work too. The Gael is a creature of habit and the GAA has become a slave of TV companies. Take Clones, where they had a two o'clock throw-in. The entire civilised word knows that if you want to get parking in the same county as the Paris of the North on the day of a 2pm throw-in you had best approach the outskirts at dawn and hide out in the Busted Sofa till five-to-two. The Gael has his club activity (be it GAA or its sister game of golf) on a Sunday morning and isn't always prepared to give this up to attend the pullers'-and-draggers' day out.

In Croke Park on Saturday we had an oddly lonesome experience. Those Dubs who habitually complain about the county footballers being put under pressure by bloody media hype will have noticed that in a summer when there has been no hype some 50,000 of their fair-weather confederates appear to have gone missing. That's a fair swelling in the ranks of the vanished.

As for Munster? Well, if you aspire to have a social life or at least a passing relationship with Arthur J's dark restorative, it is a big ask to be told to go to Semple Stadium on a wet Saturday night with the prospect of facing into exiting traffic as late as 10pm while sitting in your car sogging wet. Especially when you can watch it all on television. On the night that was in it, a crowd of over 22,000 wasn't bad. And for both teams it will swell.

One feels, too, that The Gael is a little sick of and alienated by the carry on of insurance companies. Being told again and again that trespassing on the pitch will cause one to rot in hell forever or to trigger Plan B is a little tiresome. People who used to feel at home in GAA grounds feel more and more that they are just customers. Most of my acquaintance would be happy to waive their rights to sue should they trespass in a time of joy and be trampled by the herd or be mistaken for somebody else and be wantonly Sluddenised.

Ditto the helmets business, which is part of a process of (inadvertently perhaps) removing the character and personality of players from the game. In Thurles the excitement of the proceedings was diminished somewhat by the fact some of the great recognisable faces were hidden behind their micro burkas.

This is a problem which ice hockey in the US has suffered from for many years. People can't see the players and don't identify with them. The NHL, though, is aggressive about getting players to put their faces in the media.

Which brings us to a tune this column has been banging out for some time: the remove between players and audience. Times are hard and the market is competitive. Saturday night is a good taking off point for this argument.

Remember that remarkable day in 2004, perhaps the greatest Munster final ever played? Cork were trying the novel tactic of filling their half forward line with McCarthys. Garvan, Timmy and Nially. Freakishly it was the little heralded Garvan who scored the early goal which lit the touch paper.

And the game rose into the sky then for us to gaze in wonder. John Mullane's look of despair when shown the red card by Sean McMahon. Paul Flynn's dancing free. Ken McGrath plucking that late ball from the sky, and Dan the Man was scoring goals back then.

The point is this. Look at the characters from that day who have endured and were with us in some form or other on Saturday. For Waterford, the Prendergasts, Declan, and Seamus. Eoin Murphy. Tony Browne. Ken McGrath. Eoin Kelly. Dan Shanahan. Brick Walsh. John Mullane. Eoin McGrath.

And for Cork: Donal Og Cusack; Brian Murphy; Sean Og O hAilpin. Ronan Curran. John Gardiner. Tom Kenny. John O'Connor. Niall McCarthy and Ben O'Connor.

Toss in the ever-fascinating Davy Fitz. You had a cast of characters we know and identify with. Through the years these guys have developed profiles which make them easy and compulsive to follow. They are distinctive figures whom we have followed through thick and thin, through heartbreak and controversy, through strikes and victories.

You always travel to a Munster final hoping for a classic which will fatten the legend of the fixture. More often than not you settle for something interesting and honest which holds your interest until the end. So it was yesterday.

There is an ease and a thrill to being in their audience when they play. We know them because as men and teams they have opened themselves up to us, talked and given us a real flavour of their personalities and the chemistry of their teams. Waterford and Cork will bring good crowds to the remainder of their games because we love the story and the narrative which they provide, they draw the neutral in, we have a relationship with those players and teams.

In Dublin, by contrast, there are (sadly) perhaps seven or eight thousand people who feel they have a relationship with the county hurlers. Part of the battle is getting out there and selling the players through media.

Sadly the game has been diminished by paranoid managers and by sponsors who pay a thousand a shot for players to sit against a backdrop of logos and mutter banalities. They are selling product but not the game.

It was a disappointing weekend in many way. And it shouldn't have been. The GAA needs to rewind the clock a little and stop trying to homogenise the games with every cold-blooded pro sport we see on Sky. The Gael is pining.

[Onlooker]

It takes a certain sort of individual eejit to traipse halfway across Ireland and pay €20 to watch players go through the motions.

Don't be too PC!

It is a much bigger eejit who travels to England to go a Premier League match and he certainly won't get in to the Stand for 25 Euro.

[Bogball XV]

It takes a certain sort of individual eejit to traipse halfway across Ireland and pay €20 to watch players go through the motions.

Don't be too PC!

It is a much bigger eejit who travels to England to go a Premier League match and he certainly won't get in to the Stand for 25 Euro.

not remotely relevant, although it's often thrown out there.

[imtommygunn]

It is a much bigger eejit who travels to England to go a Premier League match and he certainly won't get in to the Stand for 25 Euro.

You're paying all the wages when you go to a premier league game. Hard to see how the GAA can justify their prices. Yes they have overheads we understand however they have been milking people for the last few years.(Moreso to league games might I add)

[donelli]

Theses prices are ridiculus...
just looked up for a seat in croker for saturday...EUR30!!! Obviously robbing Louth of a leinster title wasnt enough. Now they rob it in the pockets..
to follow my county i pay 25 for ulster final, 6 days later pay 30 in croker (33 incl the booking charge). If we win this, another 30-40 the following week???

gaa seriously taking the p1ss now...
25 was acceptable for an ulster final.
30 for a qualifier is a joke....and dont argue you're getting 2 games for it as couldnt be arsed to watch the dubs play louth.

These prices are turning people away from the game....it'll be another half empty croker this weekend....