IRFU: The price is right for our corporate Lansdowne clients
The football body surprised everyone when it revealed the details of their tiered price structure for premium seating last week.
The FAI’s most expensive 10-year seat will cost buyers €32,000 whereas the IRFU’s ceiling for such tickets is €15,000.
The FAI is seeking buyers for almost 10,000 corporate tickets. Their rugby counterparts were in the market for approximately half that number with the same again due to come up for resale in five years’ time.
“We have a lot of experience in terms of selling 10-year tickets to our particular support base and we are quite happy with what we have achieved,” said Browne who added that he was satisfied with the FAI’s ability to meet their financial commitments towards Lansdowne Road.
“We are fortunate that, in another four or five years’ time, we will have another tranche of tickets coming on stream as people come to the renewal of the original 5,000 that were there at Lansdowne Road. We are quite happy with the approach that we took.”
Browne was speaking at the IRFU’s launch of its second Strategic Plan covering the period of 2008 to 2012 where it was announced that the union plans to increase its revenues by 35% to €69m by the end of that period.
It is an ambitious figure, particularly given the depressing economic climate. But Browne is confident that the target can be met, but it will depend greatly on whether the national team can continue to remain as competitive as it has been in recent times.
Paramount to that, and the entire Strategic Plan, is the Six Nations which continues to be the chief source of revenue for the IRFU.
“In terms of the Six Nations, we would like to be winning it obviously but, from a financial point of view, it is important that we are finishing in the top three. There is no reward for mediocrity. The higher we finish in the Six Nations, the more beneficial financially it would be for us as a union. Don’t forget that the professional game generates a surplus and that surplus is pumped back into the domestic game.
“We are pumping between €9.5m and €10m into the domestic game and that can only be continued as long as we are being successful at the professional level with the national team.”
Many of the goals listed yesterday — incorporating the domestic and professional game, finance and marketing — were similar, and in some case identical, to those unveiled in the first Strategic Plan four years ago.
The chief challenges set for the national team are: to reach the last four of the 2011 Rugby World Cup, win one Six Nations championship, win Triple Crowns, win at least one game against a SANZAR nation in the autumn and again in the summer.
The national team fell short of achieving the first two of those between 2004 and 2008 and the team’s dismal failure at the 2007 Rugby World Cup proved to be the last nail in the coffin for Eddie O’Sullivan as team coach
The Six Nations may well be the IRFU’s bread and butter but success and failure at the World Cup has increasingly become the yardstick on which coaches and teams are judged. Wins in the southern hemisphere have been pinpointed as crucial to hopes of success in 2011.
“The reality that is if we want to achieve everything that we aspire to for the national team we need to be winning those matches against SANZAR opposition,” said Browne. “We have come very close on occasion on previous tours but we just haven’t made that breakthrough.
“We have set the bar that little bit higher to see if we can make that breakthrough. To be fair, the players aspire to that as well and we have managed wins against SANZAR nations here in the autumn for the past few years. If we don’t do that we are not going to achieve what we want to in the World Cup.”
Targets for the provincial game remain the same as before with one Heineken Cup success, two Magners League titles and a smooth working relationship between the provinces and the national side listed as the goals in that particular sphere.
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