Tommy Martin: All I can say is thank God we didn’t qualify for the World Cup

Here we were thinking the whole point of having the Ryder Cup in Ireland was to fleece the Yanks but when the scorpion tail of the free-market stings us in return, we don’t like it so much

Daily tickets for the 2027 Ryder Cup at Adare Manor were priced at €499. Pic: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

Inflation, innit?

There we were on Tuesday, all shocked and appalled at the news that Ryder Cup tickets for next year’s shindig in Adare would cost €499. Nearly five hundred quid, for the privilege of seeing JJ Spaun in the flesh. What a nerve!

Then by Thursday, it was reported that tickets for July’s World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey were going on FIFA’s official resale site for just under $2.3m each. And that’s for seats behind one of the goals, not even in the prawn taco section beside Gianni Infantino and various morally dubious autocrats.

Fifa don’t set the prices on their resale site but happily they get 15% from the buyer and seller of every transaction. As Infantino says, football truly is the game that bring the world together, but only so that Fifa can take a cut off both ends of the deal.

So, it’s all relative. Count yourself lucky if you were in the queue to hand over the price of a no-frills package holiday in exchange for a day following the duelling continents of team golf in the luxury surrounds of Adare Manor. A snip at €499. Giving them away. Seriously, some bleeding heart in the Ryder Cup should get fired. What are we running here, a soup kitchen?

Nonetheless, some people remained affronted at the amount that the Ryder Cup organisers thought appropriate to charge us. And ‘us’ is the important word here. This week’s ticket sale was exclusive to residents of the island of Ireland. And here we were thinking the whole point of having the Ryder Cup here was to fleece the Yanks?

Sure, it’s ok to put your house, conveniently located on the side of a cliff in Belmullet, up for rent for Ryder Cup week for €50,000, confident that it will be snapped up by half a dozen Wall Street investment bankers who ask only for the sheep to be cleared out of the adjacent field so they can land their chopper.

But when the scorpion tail of the free-market stings us in return, we don’t like it so much. Especially when we’ve already paid €58m as taxpayers for the privilege of staging the event, a sum the Irish Times reported last year would require topping up by at least €30m by the time a victorious Rory McIlroy is crying into Luke Donald’s armpit come the Sunday evening next September.

Most people reckoned that the state’s investment in helping plucky old JP McManus fulfil his Ryder Cup dream was a good one because of the resulting economic benefits. Government estimates put a potential return to the exchequer at around €160m in terms of hotels filled, pints drunk and shamrock-embossed souvenir tat purchased. Some believe this figure to be highly conservative and not inclusive of the marketing spinoff of countless tourists experiencing the joy of Barack Obama Plaza.

Of course, all this represents the continuation of the state’s longstanding and fundamental economic strategy, which for a century now has basically been figuring out various ways to get Americans to part with their money.

In the early 20th century, we sent our excess population over to dig holes and build things in exchange for dollars, which would be sent back home to spend on basics like food and shelter.

Then we figured out that we could get the Americans to put their factories and offshore money jiggling operations here by not charging them much tax, which in turn gave us even more dollars to spend on less basic things like patio decking and apartments in Quinta Da Lago.

Now we have reached the point where we are physically bringing the Americans over in their tens of thousands by staging NFL and college football matches and major golf events, so that they can drop off the dollars personally. But rather than letting us keep the dollars for ourselves, other people, like, say, the Gallagher brothers or the Ryder Cup organisers, are coming in and fleecing the lot of us. The hunter becomes the hunted. Law of the jungle, what can I say?

The logic of the tournament organisers is clear. They looked at Bethpage in New York last year, which rich Americans were prepared to pay €640 equivalent for a ticket, then at the amount of the same rich Americans who view a golf trip to Ireland as a pilgrimage and then added in the money sloshing around in the upper echelons of the Irish domestic economy and reckoned they could get a good slice of that pie.

Sure, the hike represents a 92% inflationary premium on what they charged just three years ago at the Marco Simone Golf & Country Club on the outskirts of Rome for the 2023 Ryder Cup. But while the Italian capital may boast the Colossuem and the Sistine Chapel, remember Limerick has King John’s Castle and the Foynes Flying Boat Museum.

And once the initial uproar upon the announcement of the ticket prices had subsided, it was succeeded by a less intrusive murmur. Friends on WhatsApp groups saying, yeah, terrible price, outrageous, a ticket to the Open is only €130…but I’m probably still going to try to get one.

These were golf fans with decent jobs and a few bob in their pocket who reckoned the price, however absurd, was one worth paying; people who see the Ryder Cup in bucket list terms, one of the pinnacles of the game, a chance to be within touching distance of one of sport’s great, dramatic contests.

Others might view it as a fun but rather silly week, a confected rivalry in which self-involved individual stars cosplay as team sport studs for a few days, prancing around like WWE wrestlers in front of over-excited, jingoistic galleries for a prize which they have forgotten about a few weeks later when they are teeing off in Abu Dhabi or Johannesburg.

Supply and demand. There are enough of the former to make it not matter about the latter. At the time of writing the Ryder Cup ticket site was experiencing technical difficulties as more than 50,000 queued to gladly fork over the half a grand. You could make the Jurassic Park argument and say that just because they could charge those prices, doesn’t mean they should, but it feels like the world is moving on from such thoughts.

All I can say is thank God we didn’t qualify for the World Cup.