70,000 Garth Brooks fans to travel from overseas for Croker shows

He’s got friends in foreign places — eight of the 400,000 tickets for Garth Brooks’ Irish gigs were bought in Afghanistan.

And a massive 70,000 tickets for Garth Brooks’ Croke Park concerts were snapped up overseas.

Some 17.5% of tickets for the five sold-out concerts in July were bought up by fans outside of Ireland.

Promoter Peter Aiken said the unprecedented overseas sales were a completely new

phenomenon.

Eight tickets were sold in Afghanistan, while 3% of overall sales were in the US, Canada, and Germany.

“We sold nearly 70,000 tickets outside of the country — we have never done anything like that. To sell 70,000 outside of Ireland when you think about it, for them to get to Ireland, whether its planes or coming on the boat, it’s a hell of a shift of people,” Aiken said.

Speaking at the launch of the 10th Live at the Marquee series in Cork yesterday, Aiken said Garth Brooks tickets were purchased in places he’d never heard of.

“We sold eight tickets in Afghanistan. That might be soldiers or whatever but we’ve got the breakdown of all the ticket sales and it’s incredible. The likes of Costa Rica — countries I’ve never heard of before and didn’t know they existed,” he said.

Of the 400,000 tickets sold for the five Garth Brooks gigs in Dublin, 15% were bought in the North and 12% in England, Scotland, and Wales.

Aiken reported that sales were made “right across Europe”. “They talk about The Gathering or different things happening over the years; say for an All-Ireland final you’ve got maybe 2,000 people coming from overseas. This is 70,000 people. You try and get a B&B anywhere in Dublin (during the concert run) — you can’t get one,” he said. “That’s what these events do.”

Aiken said “the whole industry” was surprised by Brooksmania, as demand for tickets swept the country and all five concerts sold out within minutes of going on sale.

“It’s never happened before,” he said.

Aiken declined to comment on concerns of traffic and access disruption among local residents during the course of the five Croke Park gigs in July.