The great ticket price debate: €120 to see Ireland v England game today... Deal, or no deal?

Earlier this week, I carried out a little experiment.

I logged onto the Ticketmaster website (it was working perfectly at 10am on Tuesday!) and checked out the cost of tickets for today’s eagerly-awaited soccer clash between the Republic of Ireland and England at the Aviva Stadium.

For two people attending, it offered me just two options, either €120 or €150 per ticket. To most people, this will sound steep... then again, Ireland versus the auld enemy in a competitive men’s match hasn’t happened since 1991. Imagine the Boys in Green put the ball in the English net! Imagine they win!

The two tickets for me and my son would set me back €240... call it €300 all in for presumably the slightly better view. I don’t want to go all that way for the cheap seats!

But hang on, when I say ‘all in’, I’m not counting the cost of travel.

So, I check the Iarnrod Éireann website. Two tickets for the train up is €65 - but the only train to get me back to Cork today, leaving Dublin at 9pm, appears to be sold out (you can’t buy any tickets for it online).

Do I add in the cost of an overnight stay in Dublin? A quick search of the Trivago website reveals the cheapest hotel room for two on Saturday night is €369. Doh! That plus the return train journey for two would set me back €500 before I pay for the tickets.

So, the car it is then (sorry, Eamon) - but factor in the cost of fuel and parking (wherever that is available in central Dublin on a Saturday) and let’s call that €100 at least.

The cost of my visit to the match is now up to €400 - but we will want a burger and a drink, and I imagine the Aviva won’t be selling those cheap.

So, I have a choice: Do I fork out the bones of €450 to watch a 90-minute soccer match 250km away with my son? That’s a choice that will take in a range of factors, balancing whether I can afford it, with the attraction of the fixture and the memories it will accrue.

These are decisions we all make every day of the week. We all have the prerogative to say no and cry halt, and if we do, it doesn’t mean our human rights have been traduced.

The Ireland v England tickets are priced according to the basic law of supply and demand. If the FAI deem they can charge €120 for one, that isn’t an example of capitalism gone mad, or sheer greed. It’s just a fact of life. And we either pay it, or we don’t. Tickets for Ireland v Azerbaijan would be a lot cheaper!

There has been an awful lot of guff about alleged rip-offs spoken in recent days, since the Oasis ticket sale last Saturday morning - some of it by politicians who know a populist bandwagon when they see one.

But the fact of the matter is, the cheapest concert tickets were priced roughly in line with today’s soccer match tickets, and I haven’t heard anyone give out about the Aviva prices, have you?

Indeed, you can make a case that the Government should subsidise tickets for the FAI, given these are our national teams - while nobody is going to subsidise a rich rock band.

As an aside, by Wednesday, those Ireland v England tickets had sold out - just like the Oasis ones. I’ll just have to watch the match on TV then.

Of course, the issue with the Oasis tickets wasn’t so much the initial pricing - it was the long, frustrating online queueing, and the fact some fans were charged ‘dynamic prices’ of €400 or more.

In the wake of that, this week a number of Fianna Fáil politicians said they will introduce a Bill to extend existing legislation outlawing the resale of tickets above face value, and the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) has opened an investigation.

I was among the millions to miss out on an Oasis ticket, not for the want of trying. Ultimately, while the process was frustrating, it wasn’t a ‘fiasco’, but a simple case of demand far outstripping supply - leaving an estimated 95% of applicants disappointed.

But we’ll live. And some of us will spend the next 11 months hoping to land a ticket from somewhere. Please don’t cry, never say die, as Liam Gallagher once sang.

Of course, Ticketmaster should not be immune from criticism regarding the Oasis sale. Certainly, we should have been told the prices of various tickets for the Croke Park (and UK) shows in advance. We were initially told they would start at €85 - which seemed cheap enough. Did anyone actually purchase a ticket for €85 (minus booking fee, naturally)?

Irish consumer protection laws oblige traders to clearly display prices before people make a transaction - but Ticketmaster would argue customers did have access to these once they got through the online queuing process.

That would be true - but giving fans the chance to decide on their budget beforehand would have eased the process for consumers, and taken some of the anxiety out of it.

I wonder if, psychologically, when a person got through the lengthy online queues and felt like a lottery winner, they were more likely to splash more cash as they made a snap decision on how much to spend?

Ticketmaster aren’t daft, but when they jacked up some ‘premium’ prices to an eye-watering €400 and more, the customer could simply say ‘no thanks’ and log off. I imagine most people ploughed on. More fool them, some might say, or more power to their elbow, others would insist.

Ticketmaster have some lessons to learn. They could have split up the dates and times for purchasing Oasis tickets at various venues, to spread out the demand somewhat and ease the pressure on their website - and it certainly would have been helpful if they had informed fans quickly when venues sold out, instead of leaving us to sit by our laptops and phones for hours on a Saturday morning.

There is always a temptation in this social media-driven age to over-react and cry foul whenever things don’t go our way.

But, in a free world, we are all the masters and mistresses of our own destiny. If something is too expensive, don’t pay it. If enough of us don’t pay the asking price, then rest assured, the asking price will come down.

Clearly, enough fans were willing to pay top dollar for the Oasis tickets in the UK and Ireland, and the band maximised their potential, which is human nature. Fair dues to them.

None of this is to deny that Ireland has become ridiculously expensive in recent years, we see evidence of it all the time, not just with the price of concert and soccer match tickets.

I mean, look at what €335,000 of taxpayers’ money bought when you see that bike shed at Leinster House! And politicians have the gall to say Oasis are ripping us off!

Personally, I am baffled why anyone would pay a fiver or more for a coffee, or approaching a tenner for a pint. But it’s important to accept that if you and I pay more than we think is right for an item, be it a pint, a coffee, or a concert ticket, then we are not being ripped off - we are ripping ourselves off. We are also doing our bit to ensure the prices don’t fall.

That’s just capitalism, not capitalism ‘gone mad’.