Looking for 2 tickets for Waterford vs Cork match Saturday 9th May 
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Dungeon
Woahhhh. A girl shows up and you want her in the dungeon? Who are you, @myboyblue?
Are you from Waterford or Cork? @caoimheodwyer
I didn’t see a “please” there
Cork so
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Ticketflation: How fans are being priced out of watching their favourite sports
It’s a question bothering sports fans across the world: how much will they have to pay to watch their favourite stars running around a field or hitting a ball across manicured lawns?
A fortnight ago, early tickets for next year’s Ryder Cup golf tournament in Adare Manor, priced at €499 per day and targeted at Irish residents, sold out in less than an hour.
It will be the most expensive Ryder Cup ever to be held in Europe, almost double the price of tickets for the 2023 event when it was held in Rome. And it was five times as much as the daily charge when it was last held in Ireland at the K Club in 2006.
Golf fans could only laugh when Richard Atkinson, the European Tour Group’s chief Ryder Cup officer, commented: “We’re confident in our pricing but we’ve made it accessible to everyone.”
On the same day as the tickets went on sale in Ireland, a sizeable crowd of football fans ventured to Celtic Park in Derry to watch the local team Derry City play Shamrock Rovers.
Showing that not all sports charge extortionate prices, tickets were £10 (€11.60) for adults and a fiver for children, and as a result the home team attracted its biggest crowd in decades at 7,000.
The Ryder Cup might attract headlines for its over-the-top prices but at a local level some sports clubs closer to the grassroots are attracting decent crowds by keeping prices down.
Just €20 is the norm in the League of Ireland – and a growing fan base seems to favour the community atmosphere over the sterile feel of so much overpriced professional sport.
These could be sold on and end up with the fans of the opposing team, corporate interests or ‘event tourists’, who don’t know the difference between a hooker and a haka
While the slick Leinster rugby team struggles to attract big crowds to the Aviva Stadium at prices of up to €90 per head, Irish Independent rugby correspondent Rúaidhrí O’Connor has noted a resurgence in the lower-level All-Ireland League. For €10, fans can enjoy an afternoon of sport and then have a drink in the club bar. Rugby fans may be mostly middle-class but they do not have bottomless pockets.
Premium tickets for Ireland’s Six Nations clash with Scotland this year cost up to €185. Photo: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile
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News in 90 seconds - May 8
Meanwhile, the soccer World Cup in Canada, Mexico and the US seems to be on another planet entirely when it comes to pricing. The tournament is set to encapsulate the Trump idea of the sporting venue as a rich person’s playground, where ordinary fans are simply there to be fleeced. This week, the president of Fifa, Gianni Infantino, was struggling to defend himself as prices spiralled out of control for some matches at the World Cup.
The Guardian reported that Fifa’s World Cup resale website last week advertised four tickets to the final at the stunning cost of $2.3m (€1.95m) each.
“If some people put on the resale market some tickets for the final at $2m, number one it doesn’t mean that the tickets cost $2m,” Infantino remarked. “And number two, it doesn’t mean that somebody will buy these tickets. And if somebody buys a ticket for the final for $2m, I will personally bring him a hotdog and a Coke to make sure that he has a great experience.”
Even at face value, the most expensive tickets for the final were priced at about $11,000 (€9,350). Earlier games in the tournament are obviously much cheaper, but have still blown a hole in the pockets of ordinary fans.
Out of control: Fifa boss Gianni Infantino was asked about tickets reportedly on sale for $2.3m for this year’s World Cup final. Photo: Emilee Chinn/Getty
What would it have cost an Irish football fan if their dreams had come true and we had qualified for the tournament for the first time since 2002?
Ireland would have played Mexico in Mexico City on June 24 – that place is now taken by Ireland’s play-off victors Czechia. The game is a sell-out, but tickets are available on the ticket resale site Viagogo. The cheapest seats available cost $1,280 (€1,090) and the most expensive over $10,000 each. The original face value prices ranged from $225 to $595.
The BBC recently estimated how much it would cost Scottish and English fans travelling to the tournament – including match tickets, flight, modest accommodation, internal travel and other costs. Its survey estimated that a Scottish couple would spend about €17,000, while a pair of English fans would shell out about €15,000. That’s just for the group stage.
Defending the high cost burden on ordinary fans, Infantino said: “We have to look at the market – we are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world. So we have to apply market rates.”
However, according to the New York Post, Trump was taken aback on Thursday to find out how much fans were being charged: “I did not know that number. I would certainly like to be there, but I wouldn’t pay it either, to be honest with you,” he said.
Compared to the Ryder Cup and World Cup excesses, the GAA and other Irish sporting bodies might boast their ticket prices are reasonable.
Ryder Cup ticket prices for Adare Manor in Limerick are five times as high as the last time the event was staged in Ireland in 2006 (left). Photo: David Cannon/Sportsfile
Based on figures from the Central Statistics Office, the price of an All-Ireland hurling final stand ticket at Croke Park is nine times what it was in 1994.
Back then, a stand ticket for the finals was IR£9 (the equivalent of €11.43). The price rose to €80 by 2013, and in 2025 cost €100. When one allows for inflation, the price is almost five times what it was in 1994.
The price trend for the All-Ireland football final tickets is similar. For regular championship matches, the ticket prices are a lot more modest. A Tipperary fan gave an example of how much it cost to go to a hurling match featuring his beloved county against Clare with his two daughters on May 16 at Semple Stadium. He was charged €30 for a stand ticket and the girls were charged €5 each. The fan of the Premier County says: “I was pleasantly surprised to find that it cost a fiver for children to sit down and watch a match like that. It seems incredibly good value.”
But prices for children are not so low at every GAA match. Michael Kilcoyne, chairman of the Consumers’ Association, expresses concern that Mayo hiked prices for kids from €5 to €35 for stand tickets at a Mayo v Roscommon match.
Kilcoyne says: “It’s got to the stage in this country when nobody seems to know when enough is enough.”
The CEO of Connacht GAA John Prenty defended the hefty price increase in an interview with Mid West radio, saying that it was made for “logistical” and “economic” reasons.
And when asked why the price for pensioners at Mayo’s recent U-20 match against Galway rose from €10 to €15, Prenty said that this was due to a “huge amount of people coming purporting to be pensioners who weren’t pensioners”.
Mayo supporters during the Connacht GAA Football Senior Championship semi-final match defeat in Castlebar, where children’s stand ticket prices were hiked from €5 to €35. Photo: Paul Phelan/Sportsfile
It is perhaps rugby that is now attracting the most attention when it comes to pricing, with the cost for premium seats at some internationals edging towards €200.
The cheapest seats put on limited general sale before an Ireland-South Africa match last November were €156. Adult prices for Six Nations games start at €100 and premium tickets for the game against Scotland this year cost up to €185. That’s if you can get tickets at face value.
Close observers of the international game have noticed that the crowd at the matches is different to that of 20 years ago.
Many tickets distributed to clubs are not taken up by members, who are finding the prices of a stay in Dublin prohibitive.
These could be sold on and end up with the fans of the opposing team, corporate interests or ‘event tourists’, who don’t know the difference between a hooker and a haka.
So a sizeable portion of the crowd are not ordinary Irish rugby fans – and that is said to be affecting the atmosphere at games.
Prices for international soccer matches tend to be cheaper than rugby with the lower prices starting at €55 for a recent World Cup qualifier against Armenia.
Biggest crowd in decades: Tickets for Derry City’s recent match with Shamrock Rovers were priced at just £10 (€11.60). Photo: Stephen McCarthy/Sportfile
Season tickets for the soccer internationals perhaps offer the best value with prices for friendlies and qualifiers for 2026 starting at €175 for Category D tickets for the year and going up to €400 for premium seats. So why can the rugby authorities charge more than their soccer counterparts? Podcast presenter and event organiser Rob Hartnett, chief executive of Sport for Business, says: “We live in a supply and demand economy. The IRFU benchmarks against other rugby unions and with fewer games have to charge premium.”
Hartnett adds: “The demographics of the fan bases are different [in terms of] culture, tradition and socioeconomics. Rugby can charge higher because their core fans have greater capacity to pay more.”
It is clear that thousands of tickets are falling into the hands of resellers charging multiples of the face value. Legislation introduced five years ago supposedly made it an offence to sell tickets above face value at designated venues, including the Aviva Stadium, but as reported this week, there have been no prosecutions.
It would be no surprise if the face value price of the priciest tickets for Ireland’s match against England next year in the Six Nations hits €200. Already on reselling sites, tickets for it were this week up for sale for up to €1,600.
Kilcoyne says: “The law was supposed to prevent this type of thing, but there has not been a single prosecution. Enforcement has been poor and the law is a waste of time.”
Padraig Power, deputy CEO of the IRFU, says: “Aviva Stadium is a designated venue under Irish legislation, making it an offence to sell tickets above face value, and the IRFU fully supports An Garda Síochána in enforcing these measures.”
He says pricing decisions are closely linked to the need to reinvest across all levels of the game and any significant reduction would directly impact the ability to remain competitive internationally.
“The IRFU’s approach to ticket-pricing is guided by benchmarking against comparable Six Nations unions and the broader international rugby landscape, while also ensuring the long-term sustainability of the game in Ireland.
“Pricing reflects both market demand and the premium nature of top-tier international fixtures, with Aviva Stadium’s scale relative to other Six Nations venues contributing to consistently strong demand for tickets.”
He said 40pc of tickets for the 2025 November Series were priced under €100, representing more than 50,000 tickets, with allocations ring-fenced for under-18s through clubs and schools to help grow the next generation of supporters.
The international rugby team still commonly plays to sell-out crowds, but the empty spaces at Leinster games show that rugby fans cannot be taken for granted.
A rising generation may convert to the football code, preferring the buzz and community atmosphere of Phibsborough, home of Bohemian FC, where match tickets are €22 – or €400 for annual club membership.
There are rarely empty spaces on match nights at Dalymount Park.