Are fans being priced out of games?
There’s been quite a bit of talk recently regarding the price of tickets for top sporting events such as the All Blacks, and whether it’s becoming too expensive for the fans.
Sports Prompter Dean Lonergan offers his insights on prices and what gets fans through the gates.
“There’s a fine line between money coming in, and charges you can, the price you can charge, but at the end of the day, you’ve got a financial responsibility.”
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Weekend Sport podcast with Jason Vine
from NEWSTALKZB some very interesting conversation this week about the
price of attending All Blacks test matches. Gregor Paul wrote
an article in The Herald which was mainly around corporate packages,
but also shine a light on just how expensive it
is to watch top level sport these days. Now, we
(00:29):
all know ticket revenue is a vital part of any
professional sports business, but how do you balance income with
accessibility to ensure the long term health of your sport.
At what point does the average fan and the average
family become priced out of the experience of live sport.
(00:51):
And without that live experience, how can we expect our
kids to fall in love with sport the same way
we did by going along and watching it and becoming
lifelong fans. One of our foremost sports promoters is Dean
Lonigan who joins us now. Dean, thanks for taking the
time for a chat on the show this afternoon. Just
(01:11):
make sure we're going to get you to air in
the right place there by getting my favors all on
the right places. How important Dean is watching live sport,
going along to the game to developing a lifelong love
of that particular sport, particularly for kids.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Fin it's incredibly important, but you also don't have to
have free or cheap access to teams like the All Blacks.
And you've got to realize there's multiple levels of the sport.
Obviously at rugby union, you start a club, then you
get a provincial, then Super Rugby and of course the
All Blacks. And every time you go up the it's
tier you go up, it becomes more and more expensive,
so you know, to be pulling out the All Blacks
(01:50):
only on the Gillarrugby Union only two weeks ago, I
think said that they had a loss of twenty million
dollars and professional rugby has to be funded somehow, So
it's there to say at the highest level you could
expect to pay big prices and the families can't afford
to go to these particular games. Might they just have
to go to the next tier down and if you
just keep going down, But obviously everyone wants to go
(02:12):
to see the big games because that's all the stars
playing the stars. A key to starts, the key to
the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
When you were growing up and watching live rugby league,
was that kind of club rugby league that you were
watching that first formed what would become a pro career
in the sport for you.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
We used to go to obviously when you're planning to youngster.
We used to go a lot of NAR eight eighten
or under twenty one of my cousins that were playing
a particularly a guy called Mark Humphreys who played for
the Glory team though over three or four years at
a very young age. They did really well. I used
to love going to watch them, and every now and
then you get a sampful of One of the biggest
memories I've got of a young fellow grown up is
(02:51):
when I think it was either the British Lions or
the Great Britain team came out here and a guy
called Jim Mills stood on John Greengrass's kain. It was
probably one of the most impleness moments in regular league history.
But you know, we didn't go too much to the
big games. It was always just the club environment where
you had friends playing the people you knew, and it
was I always found in the fascinating and enjoyable experience,
(03:13):
you know, seeing people you knew go well.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
So you've landed on a really interesting point there Diana
and that you know, it maybe doesn't necessarily have to
be the all blacks playing rugby that somebody sees a
young boy or girl for the first time, even if
it's just someone from their club or provincial or even
Super rugby, you still think the love of the game
can be developed in those environments.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Of course, that's why you have a thing called television
that if you want, if you can't afford to go,
you can get it at home and access the reasonably
cheap at home. And I think the New Zilla Rugby Union,
and this is what most journalists I don't think get,
or indeed the public get. They had bent over backwards
to service in New Zilla Rugby fan and I know
everyone will jump up ands about this, but they haven't
(03:57):
tried to keep all their best players at home for
the last twenty five years. They've been trying to chase
the market. So they're forever making more and more money
to pay the players to keep them at home, finding
against the market, which I think is a losing battle.
The only time they make money seriously is when the
Lions come, and that's not going to happen until twenty
twenty nine, I think. And the New Zella Rugby Union,
(04:19):
if you're a fan, needs to be applauded to keeping
all these people, all these great players at home. In
my opinion, what they need to do is a fundamental
shift away from their current policy. They need to allow
their players to go overseas to play and come back
only for test matches, and to be fair, they should
take a lot of their home test matches overseas. And
I know there's rules around what they do. But when
you can go to Queensland, you can go to New
(04:40):
South Wales, or you can go to WA and play
Australia over there, or indeed in Wa you can play
South Africa over there, and you can pull them sponsorship
dollars about eight million dollars out of a local government
and then turn around and charge premiums for your corporate
hospitality and you get a hell of a lot more
money over there. By allowing you players to go overseas,
(05:01):
what you do is you reduce your main cost. I
think there's ninety two million dollars every year committed to
player paying rugby players in this country at the elite level.
If you could remove thirty, forty or fifty million dollars
of this cost, you'd start to do something you're deciminded
to do as a professional rugby organization, and that has
made money and before people jump up and down and
say you can't do that. Well last time. I look
(05:22):
South Africa as a current world champion and they now
allow their players to go out of the seas. And
I also believe Brazil and Argentina have been pretty successful
in the round ball game and yet bugger all their
players play at HadAM, So I don't know what this
fascination is with keeping the players at ARME. The New
Zealand Rugby Union has got some massive decisions to make
over the next few years to change in their policy
(05:43):
because one thing you can't do for a country of
five million people. We've got to think for the New
zill And peso, which is actually not very well regarded.
It's an actually when you compare it to me in
paid in euro or indeed Japanese yen or US dollars,
and then it's going to make some big decisions because
they can't sustain these losses. I think we already out
(06:05):
of the two undred and twenty million dollars a silver
light put in the New Zealand rugby union reserves already
down to one hundred and seventy million. You can't eat
gone backwards. So it'll be fascinating to see what David
Kirk pulls out as a new chairman of the Ends.
You know, he's obviously a succeed he's been running the
game of rugby for an enormously a long time. You know,
it was the first World Cup winning captain, so he's
obviously got the game at heart, and it'll be fascinated
(06:27):
and see what magic eat palls out. But I don't
think you have to look too far than the South
Africans to see what you've got to do to have
a world winning team and ideally get rid of the
burden of paying your players an absolute fortune to start
at home when it's not economically viable.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
If I could just play Devil's advocate to that argument, then, Dean,
if you allow your best players to go overseas to
make more money and take more All Blacks test matches
off shore, don't you go even further down the track
of denying your average everyday New Zealander access to watching
the All Blacks, a team that means so much to us.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Well, they're still on TV number one and number two.
You'd still play tests at home, it just becomes a
more special occasion. At the moment, I think, can you
en correct me to like Piney, we played ten, eleven,
twelve Test matches at home and we play them all
around the country. That's quite a huge supply of product,
and it's not that special to go and see an
all black Test match when you've got that oversupply, in
(07:22):
my opinion, So the less you play, the more desirable
they become. And at the end of the day, what
you need to do as a professional organization, you must
make money, which is why they did the Silver Aid deal.
But they're still going backwards. And here's where I can
tell you the big problem is coming right now. The
NRL is expanding to twenty teams. Now they've got two
more teams to come, and it's a huge amount of
(07:44):
players to find a playing base. The NRL is making
sixty billion dollars a year. They've got reserves right now
of three hundred and fifty million dollars and in a
couple of years it'll be half of billion dollars. When
the NRL say we need to go out and get
premium players, and we're going to take the best that
rugby union's got to offer. They are going to go
to Australia to get We're going to come here. We've
(08:04):
got something like twenty five thousand Red said, you sell
a rugby league players and about one hundred and twenty
thousand regis and rugby union players now from the ages
of fifteen or thirteen through to about nineteen. The skill
sets are pretty similar, aren't to specialize? Right, So you
can make your transition into rugby league from rugby union.
And I promise you unless than you sell a rugby
(08:24):
union starts making money, they will be powerless to stop it.
So they've got some big decisions to make, and you've
got to take a long term view rather than a
short term view. And everybody starts screaming, well, we've got
to have more tests here. Well, fundamentally it'd be nice
to have more tests here, but your fundamental problems they're
just losing so much money they can't afford to.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Can I ask a question about going to the game
and what it's like when you're there and attach it
to a financial argument. If you sell ten thousand tickets
for eleven dollars each, you make more money than if
you sell twenty thousand tickets at five dollars each. But
when you've got twenty thousand at the grounds, the atmosphere
is a heck of a lot better. Do you think
a finance department cares about that?
Speaker 2 (09:06):
No, because what they do know is they're pretty much
going to settle the games out. Give you a classic example, Pining.
I put on a boxing match that featured Manidakil versus
a guy called Jeff Horn in Australia, and I think
the gross turnover through the gate we had fifty thousand
people turn up. The gross turnover at the gate was
about eight point two to eight point five million Australian dollars, right,
(09:29):
which in Australian boxing terms or Australian sport terms, that
was enormous. Fifty thousand people was at number. Now I
went to a boxing match Manipacchio versus Floyd Mayweather, which
only had eleven thousand people at it, and they turned
over seventy five million US dollars at the gate, right,
It was absolutely full. So what you've got to do
(09:51):
is you've got to find there's probably a fine line
between There's a fine line between money coming and charges
you can. You can charge what the prices you can charge,
but at the end of the day, fining, you've got
a financial responsibility. And it's only people who have never
run businesses and don't know the pain of what it's
(10:11):
like to try and cover the bills when you haven't
got enough money in the bank. Now, at the moment
he's ever Rugan Union's got one hundred and seventy million
dollars in the bank. But if they keep going the
way they are with the exception of the Lines tour,
so I'll end up with one hundred million in the bank.
Didn't they end up with fifty million in the bank.
Then they'll be thirty million in the bank. Then what
do you do? So you've got to address this stuff early.
And the last thing they want is people coming to
(10:33):
approach their players, and at some stage the market internationally
will be that strong the players can't say no. So
what I would do is look at the South African
Rugby Union, which is there Comet's national sport as well,
and say what are they doing right now? I don't
know the financials of the South African Rugby Union, but
I do know that they're allowing your players to play overseas,
and in my opinion, if we're allowed the All Blacks
(10:55):
to go overseas, all you're going to do is get
a much greater depth of players, because all of a
sudden you're going to have a whole lot of players
come up and take the places in the super teams
and the NPC teams of the guys going overseas, and
you're going to have much greater depth to pick from. Now.
I know there will be a lot of people screaming
out there it can't be done, it can't be done.
But what o the sayers? Look at South Africa, look
(11:16):
at Argentina, thind Soccer, look at Brazil somehow they managed
to do it, And look at the balance sheet of
the ends at are you, which is they've had to
sell off a serious percentage of the game and I
think they give up five percent of their gross revenue
to pay for that Silver Eat deal, which is effectively alone. Mate,
it's fair to space that this is unsustainable and you're
(11:37):
going to make some seriously big and hard decisions and
not do dis in future and complaining about ticket prices,
you should be gone. You should be screaming in New
Zealand Regy Union. Thank you so much for trying to
subsidize the game at home and selling tickets as simpney
as you are, rather than say they have been out
price of the game because internationally compared the international revenues, Mate,
(11:58):
what we get at home is.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Nothing, Dean. I can tell you we're going to open
the lines at the moment and they will light up
like a Christmas tree. You always give us something, Mate,
always entertaining and very informative chatting to you. Thanks for
taking the time this afternoon. Thanks mate, That's Steve Lornigan.
Plenty to unpack. There for more from Weekend Sport with
Jason Fine. Listen live to News Talk set B weekends
(12:22):
from midday, or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Weekend Sport podcast with Jason Vine
from NEWSTALKZB some very interesting conversation this week about the
price of attending All Blacks test matches. Gregor Paul wrote
an article in The Herald which was mainly around corporate packages,
but also shine a light on just how expensive it
is to watch top level sport these days. Now, we
(00:29):
all know ticket revenue is a vital part of any
professional sports business, but how do you balance income with
accessibility to ensure the long term health of your sport.
At what point does the average fan and the average
family become priced out of the experience of live sport.
(00:51):
And without that live experience, how can we expect our
kids to fall in love with sport the same way
we did by going along and watching it and becoming
lifelong fans. One of our foremost sports promoters is Dean
Lonigan who joins us now. Dean, thanks for taking the
time for a chat on the show this afternoon. Just
(01:11):
make sure we're going to get you to air in
the right place there by getting my favors all on
the right places. How important Dean is watching live sport,
going along to the game to developing a lifelong love
of that particular sport, particularly for kids.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Fin it's incredibly important, but you also don't have to
have free or cheap access to teams like the All Blacks.
And you've got to realize there's multiple levels of the sport.
Obviously at rugby union, you start a club, then you
get a provincial, then Super Rugby and of course the
All Blacks. And every time you go up the it's
tier you go up, it becomes more and more expensive,
so you know, to be pulling out the All Blacks
(01:50):
only on the Gillarrugby Union only two weeks ago, I
think said that they had a loss of twenty million
dollars and professional rugby has to be funded somehow, So
it's there to say at the highest level you could
expect to pay big prices and the families can't afford
to go to these particular games. Might they just have
to go to the next tier down and if you
just keep going down, But obviously everyone wants to go
(02:12):
to see the big games because that's all the stars
playing the stars. A key to starts, the key to
the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
When you were growing up and watching live rugby league,
was that kind of club rugby league that you were
watching that first formed what would become a pro career
in the sport for you.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
We used to go to obviously when you're planning to youngster.
We used to go a lot of NAR eight eighten
or under twenty one of my cousins that were playing
a particularly a guy called Mark Humphreys who played for
the Glory team though over three or four years at
a very young age. They did really well. I used
to love going to watch them, and every now and
then you get a sampful of One of the biggest
memories I've got of a young fellow grown up is
(02:51):
when I think it was either the British Lions or
the Great Britain team came out here and a guy
called Jim Mills stood on John Greengrass's kain. It was
probably one of the most impleness moments in regular league history.
But you know, we didn't go too much to the
big games. It was always just the club environment where
you had friends playing the people you knew, and it
was I always found in the fascinating and enjoyable experience,
(03:13):
you know, seeing people you knew go well.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
So you've landed on a really interesting point there Diana
and that you know, it maybe doesn't necessarily have to
be the all blacks playing rugby that somebody sees a
young boy or girl for the first time, even if
it's just someone from their club or provincial or even
Super rugby, you still think the love of the game
can be developed in those environments.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Of course, that's why you have a thing called television
that if you want, if you can't afford to go,
you can get it at home and access the reasonably
cheap at home. And I think the New Zilla Rugby Union,
and this is what most journalists I don't think get,
or indeed the public get. They had bent over backwards
to service in New Zilla Rugby fan and I know
everyone will jump up ands about this, but they haven't
(03:57):
tried to keep all their best players at home for
the last twenty five years. They've been trying to chase
the market. So they're forever making more and more money
to pay the players to keep them at home, finding
against the market, which I think is a losing battle.
The only time they make money seriously is when the
Lions come, and that's not going to happen until twenty
twenty nine, I think. And the New Zella Rugby Union,
(04:19):
if you're a fan, needs to be applauded to keeping
all these people, all these great players at home. In
my opinion, what they need to do is a fundamental
shift away from their current policy. They need to allow
their players to go overseas to play and come back
only for test matches, and to be fair, they should
take a lot of their home test matches overseas. And
I know there's rules around what they do. But when
you can go to Queensland, you can go to New
(04:40):
South Wales, or you can go to WA and play
Australia over there, or indeed in Wa you can play
South Africa over there, and you can pull them sponsorship
dollars about eight million dollars out of a local government
and then turn around and charge premiums for your corporate
hospitality and you get a hell of a lot more
money over there. By allowing you players to go overseas,
(05:01):
what you do is you reduce your main cost. I
think there's ninety two million dollars every year committed to
player paying rugby players in this country at the elite level.
If you could remove thirty, forty or fifty million dollars
of this cost, you'd start to do something you're deciminded
to do as a professional rugby organization, and that has
made money and before people jump up and down and
say you can't do that. Well last time. I look
(05:22):
South Africa as a current world champion and they now
allow their players to go out of the seas. And
I also believe Brazil and Argentina have been pretty successful
in the round ball game and yet bugger all their
players play at HadAM, So I don't know what this
fascination is with keeping the players at ARME. The New
Zealand Rugby Union has got some massive decisions to make
over the next few years to change in their policy
(05:43):
because one thing you can't do for a country of
five million people. We've got to think for the New
zill And peso, which is actually not very well regarded.
It's an actually when you compare it to me in
paid in euro or indeed Japanese yen or US dollars,
and then it's going to make some big decisions because
they can't sustain these losses. I think we already out
(06:05):
of the two undred and twenty million dollars a silver
light put in the New Zealand rugby union reserves already
down to one hundred and seventy million. You can't eat
gone backwards. So it'll be fascinating to see what David
Kirk pulls out as a new chairman of the Ends.
You know, he's obviously a succeed he's been running the
game of rugby for an enormously a long time. You know,
it was the first World Cup winning captain, so he's
obviously got the game at heart, and it'll be fascinated
(06:27):
and see what magic eat palls out. But I don't
think you have to look too far than the South
Africans to see what you've got to do to have
a world winning team and ideally get rid of the
burden of paying your players an absolute fortune to start
at home when it's not economically viable.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
If I could just play Devil's advocate to that argument, then, Dean,
if you allow your best players to go overseas to
make more money and take more All Blacks test matches
off shore, don't you go even further down the track
of denying your average everyday New Zealander access to watching
the All Blacks, a team that means so much to us.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Well, they're still on TV number one and number two.
You'd still play tests at home, it just becomes a
more special occasion. At the moment, I think, can you
en correct me to like Piney, we played ten, eleven,
twelve Test matches at home and we play them all
around the country. That's quite a huge supply of product,
and it's not that special to go and see an
all black Test match when you've got that oversupply, in
(07:22):
my opinion, So the less you play, the more desirable
they become. And at the end of the day, what
you need to do as a professional organization, you must
make money, which is why they did the Silver Aid deal.
But they're still going backwards. And here's where I can
tell you the big problem is coming right now. The
NRL is expanding to twenty teams. Now they've got two
more teams to come, and it's a huge amount of
(07:44):
players to find a playing base. The NRL is making
sixty billion dollars a year. They've got reserves right now
of three hundred and fifty million dollars and in a
couple of years it'll be half of billion dollars. When
the NRL say we need to go out and get
premium players, and we're going to take the best that
rugby union's got to offer. They are going to go
to Australia to get We're going to come here. We've
(08:04):
got something like twenty five thousand Red said, you sell
a rugby league players and about one hundred and twenty
thousand regis and rugby union players now from the ages
of fifteen or thirteen through to about nineteen. The skill
sets are pretty similar, aren't to specialize? Right, So you
can make your transition into rugby league from rugby union.
And I promise you unless than you sell a rugby
(08:24):
union starts making money, they will be powerless to stop it.
So they've got some big decisions to make, and you've
got to take a long term view rather than a
short term view. And everybody starts screaming, well, we've got
to have more tests here. Well, fundamentally it'd be nice
to have more tests here, but your fundamental problems they're
just losing so much money they can't afford to.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Can I ask a question about going to the game
and what it's like when you're there and attach it
to a financial argument. If you sell ten thousand tickets
for eleven dollars each, you make more money than if
you sell twenty thousand tickets at five dollars each. But
when you've got twenty thousand at the grounds, the atmosphere
is a heck of a lot better. Do you think
a finance department cares about that?
Speaker 2 (09:06):
No, because what they do know is they're pretty much
going to settle the games out. Give you a classic example, Pining.
I put on a boxing match that featured Manidakil versus
a guy called Jeff Horn in Australia, and I think
the gross turnover through the gate we had fifty thousand
people turn up. The gross turnover at the gate was
about eight point two to eight point five million Australian dollars, right,
(09:29):
which in Australian boxing terms or Australian sport terms, that
was enormous. Fifty thousand people was at number. Now I
went to a boxing match Manipacchio versus Floyd Mayweather, which
only had eleven thousand people at it, and they turned
over seventy five million US dollars at the gate, right,
It was absolutely full. So what you've got to do
(09:51):
is you've got to find there's probably a fine line
between There's a fine line between money coming and charges
you can. You can charge what the prices you can charge,
but at the end of the day, fining, you've got
a financial responsibility. And it's only people who have never
run businesses and don't know the pain of what it's
(10:11):
like to try and cover the bills when you haven't
got enough money in the bank. Now, at the moment
he's ever Rugan Union's got one hundred and seventy million
dollars in the bank. But if they keep going the
way they are with the exception of the Lines tour,
so I'll end up with one hundred million in the bank.
Didn't they end up with fifty million in the bank.
Then they'll be thirty million in the bank. Then what
do you do? So you've got to address this stuff early.
And the last thing they want is people coming to
(10:33):
approach their players, and at some stage the market internationally
will be that strong the players can't say no. So
what I would do is look at the South African
Rugby Union, which is there Comet's national sport as well,
and say what are they doing right now? I don't
know the financials of the South African Rugby Union, but
I do know that they're allowing your players to play overseas,
and in my opinion, if we're allowed the All Blacks
(10:55):
to go overseas, all you're going to do is get
a much greater depth of players, because all of a
sudden you're going to have a whole lot of players
come up and take the places in the super teams
and the NPC teams of the guys going overseas, and
you're going to have much greater depth to pick from. Now.
I know there will be a lot of people screaming
out there it can't be done, it can't be done.
But what o the sayers? Look at South Africa, look
(11:16):
at Argentina, thind Soccer, look at Brazil somehow they managed
to do it, And look at the balance sheet of
the ends at are you, which is they've had to
sell off a serious percentage of the game and I
think they give up five percent of their gross revenue
to pay for that Silver Eat deal, which is effectively alone. Mate,
it's fair to space that this is unsustainable and you're
(11:37):
going to make some seriously big and hard decisions and
not do dis in future and complaining about ticket prices,
you should be gone. You should be screaming in New
Zealand Regy Union. Thank you so much for trying to
subsidize the game at home and selling tickets as simpney
as you are, rather than say they have been out
price of the game because internationally compared the international revenues, Mate,
(11:58):
what we get at home is.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Nothing, Dean. I can tell you we're going to open
the lines at the moment and they will light up
like a Christmas tree. You always give us something, Mate,
always entertaining and very informative chatting to you. Thanks for
taking the time this afternoon. Thanks mate, That's Steve Lornigan.
Plenty to unpack. There for more from Weekend Sport with
Jason Fine. Listen live to News Talk set B weekends
(12:22):
from midday, or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com