A warning from the future at Lansdowne Road

I SPENT an idle hour at the weekend watching bedraggled ranks of teenagers in orange and pink hair queuing in the rain outside Dublin’s O2 Arena.

The attraction at The Point was Paramore, a group about which I know little apart from the fact (and I am still trying to fathom why I know even this) that their music was chosen to lead off the hugely successful Twilight film, a spin-off from the vampire romance novels which attract the same fierce devotion from followers as once did Star Trek and Twin Peaks.

And with greater, or lesser, merit according to taste.

Surrounding me in a warm bar while I pondered whether the style of the young audience braving the elements opposite should properly be described as “Emo” or “pop punk” or even “post-Goth” were burly voortrekkers and Stellenbosch boys in the green and gold Springboks jerseys of the visiting South African rugby team.

They were taking on fuel, and no doubt packing a few strips of biltong in their back pockets, before heading off on the Luas in the direction of Lansdowne Road/Aviva Stadium/Dublin Arena (delete as appropriate) and sampling the watering holes along the way.

Only to be greeted when they got there by a venue disappointingly short of spectators for what had been billed as “the homecoming” and which fulfilled all the early predictions that the IRFU had got its price pointing badly wrong.

I didn’t go to the Ireland game. I had chosen long ago to order tickets for the Frank McGuinness adaptation of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey (they were €29 each, and the theatre was packed to the rafters since you ask).

But the conjunction of determined youngsters waiting for hours without complaint for tickets in ghastly weather, the empty acres in the Irish rugby stands, and the booming attendance in Abbey Street leads inexorably to two conclusions... sport has got it badly wrong in the new reality where people are going to count every cent, and the era of building big stadia, and expecting to charge high prices to fill them, is over.

Corporate sponsorship, and the leasing of plush boxes, is in decline, and will accelerate south during 2011. Only the nouveau riche can afford seats and they are becoming an endangered species.

Youngsters – the audience of tomorrow – are excluded by cost, and casual supporters are constrained by requirements to buy a package of tickets for a series of games rather than choosing to make an affordable occasional visit as a treat. This is an economic model which is years past its sell-by date. It pre-dates the crafty accountancy policies of Enron, the sub-prime crisis, before Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae fell out of love, before Lehman Brothers, Royal Bank of Scotland, Anglo Irish Bank, buy-to-let, credit card debt, NAMA and all the other transgressions which have brought us to our knees economically.

And it will have to change because TV will not tolerate the spectacle of professional sport being played in half-empty grounds with flat atmospheres. If the spectators can’t be bothered to turn up, then why should the viewers? For some sense of scale of the problems Ireland need look no further than London where the financial burden of building Wembley Stadium has generated a complex web of litigation, including the biggest compensation claim – nearly €300m – in British legal history, only settled out of court this summer when the trial judge warned at the outset that costs were likely to be in the region of €80m.

Such is the need for Wembley to generate revenues that it is now as famous as a venue for music as it is for football with Muse, U2 and Madonna all selling out concerts there. No surprise, either, for Take That to make it the centrepiece (along with the City of Manchester Stadium) of their 2011 Progress reunion tour next summer.

Across the city, the future of the Olympic Stadium after 2012 is shrouded in intrigue with the applications to take it over by West Ham United and Tottenham Hotspur now joined by a mystery third bidder who may be representing NFL interests with a view to establishing an American football franchise in London.

This could result in eight games a season, instead of the current one or two, being played in England, a proposal which makes the Premier League’s controversial “39th game” proposition look pale and wan by comparison.

Just this week Chelsea – with the smallest ground of all the leading English clubs – quietly rekindled their interest in redeveloping the historic site of the Earls Court exhibition centre which is just a short walk across West Brompton Cemetery from their current home at Stamford Bridge. The Olympic Stadium has an 80,000 capacity; any new ground in West London would need to house in the region of 65,000. But what is certain is that the per capita spend of regular football supporters, as with rugby fans, is going to decline over the next five years. If owners and sports associations want bums on seats, then they need to get real when it comes to pricing. There are plenty of better value alternatives for entertainment, and they are not going to go away.

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