When it comes to it, nobody complains about the price of an All-Ireland final ticket. There is a general flutter of rebuke and name-calling whenever a hike in ticket prices is announced, but that is always months before the final. It’s like giving out to the referee: they never change their mind.
This year, the price of a stand ticket remained unaltered at €100, but the price of a terrace ticket was increased to €60, a hike of €5. On the week of the game, nobody cares about that. In the frenzy of want the only issue is possession. Face value, no matter how barefaced, is a bargain.
Here are some immutable truths about All-Ireland tickets: there are never enough tickets to satisfy everyone who feels entitled to one; there are never, ever enough tickets for people who decide they would like to go and can’t understand why there is such a panic. Some people who don’t deserve tickets will get them.
There will be uproar.
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Who deserves what and who doesn’t is the annual flashpoint at the heart of all this. There will be people who didn’t get a ticket for yesterday and won’t get a ticket for next Sunday who will feel betrayed.
For clubs, entitlement is a minefield. Every member of a club executive will be allocated a pair of tickets, and nobody will argue. But after that there is a sliding scale of people who keep the wheels turning: who run teams and tend to pitches and raise money and go to meetings and close the gates and open the gates and respond to the latest call to arms.
Many of those people will resent being in a draw for All-Ireland tickets with a whole load of others who just pay their membership at the start of the year and stand back.
In that hierarchy of entitlement where do you draw the line? What about the person who gave 10 years’ service, or 20 years, without flinching, but are not involved now and suddenly feel forgotten? How do you explain to them that they’ll have to take their chances in the draw with people who never lifted a finger?
It is an impossible equation. In every club, there are never enough tickets to clear the debt of gratitude or even meet interest repayments on the debt.
Outside of that, there are GAA fans who support their intercounty team without being involved in a club. Not everybody is cut out to be a grass root. Many people are living away from home and have no desire to be involved with any other club. They feel entitled too. Or hard done by. Or forgotten.
For these people, access to league matches is never a problem and for most championship games the same is true. Tickets are put on general sale. First come first served. For All-Ireland finals, though, it is a closed shop.
In the build up to the hurling final the Cork county board received emails from people who had attached a screenshot of all their ticket stubs from all of Cork’s games this year. What are their consumer rights? They have none.
The counter argument is that some people are too busy with club activities on weekends to be swanning along to league games, or even the early rounds of the championship. There are only so many GAA hours in the week. Club first is the GAA’s commandment, isn’t it?
How All-Ireland final tickets are doled out by Croke Park is always interesting. In the annual report to GAA congress the numbers are laid out in tantalising detail. Over the years, many of the categories have remained the same, but the numbers have changed.
Former presidents and members of Ard-Chomhairle, for example, were allocated 1,455 tickets according to the report to annual congress 20 years ago; in the report to this year’s congress that number had fallen to 800. Camogie’s allocation was up 20 in 20 years to 140; Ladies football had dropped 40 to 100. In the continuing merger talks this will doubtless be teased out in the small print.
The really interesting one, though, is the allocation to competing counties. According to the numbers released in 2005, each county was given just 12,014 tickets. For this year’s finals, however, it is understood that each competing county was given about 20,000 tickets. The allocation to non-competing counties has dropped by nearly 7,000 in 20 years.
Is that balance right yet? The GAA regards All-Ireland finals as a come-all-ye. A national celebration. Everybody knows somebody who goes to the All-Ireland final every year, regardless of who’s playing. In that spirit, every club in a county that hasn’t reached the final is entitled to at least a pair of tickets. What they do with them is their own business.
At the end of last week, the Kilcar club in Donegal issued a statement on its Facebook page saying that “while there was a large number of names taken by people interested in the All-Ireland hurling final, it would be more beneficial to the club and its members to swap these for football tickets.”
Ticket exchanges between counties in the hurling and football finals has been common practice for decades. Unsold tickets in non-competing counties is another phenomenon that usually results in a secondary allocation for competing counties in the days before the game. Last year, that resulted in more than 3,000 extra tickets landing in Cork; this year the second wave of tickets was numbered in hundreds.
The unusual element of this year’s ticket scramble is that Cork, Tipperary, Kerry and Donegal all brought crowds to their semi-finals that vastly exceeded their allocation of tickets for the final. Cork were estimated to have brought 60,000 to their semi-final; Donegal brought in excess of 45,000; Tipperary brought close to 40,000 and Kerry brought greater crowds to their quarter-final and semi-final than at any time in recent memory.
In Cork, the runaway support for the team caused an insoluble problem. In Donegal, it was reported locally that their allocation will cover every adult club member in a county with just 40 clubs. But that still leaves their partners and kids, and the remainder of the 45,000 who turned up the Meath game.
There will always be hard cases and incidents of outrageous wrongdoing. Is there a better way of doing it? No. The atrocities will continue.
