- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
A lot has been made this year of the increase to the price of Grand Final tickets. A lot has been made, too, of the so-called “war on scalpers”. But not enough attention has been given to the real travesty of Grand Final ticketing – the allocation of tickets and the shutting out of genuine fans.
Sure, this issue gets brought up in some capacity most other years, but never to the extent that it puts all that much pressure on the AFL. Victorian premier John Brumby helped put the spotlight on scalping this week, but it was easy to feel he was not taking aim in the right direction.
After all, if we are to define scalping as the practice of obtaining tickets in order to sell them at a higher price, then the biggest scalpers you’ll find this week are not seedy-looking blokes standing outside the ‘G – they are the AFL and its sixteen clubs.
The MCG holds 100,000. Not enough seats to accommodate every single person who’d like to go to the game, sure, but a heck of a lot all the same.
The problem lies in that of those 100,000 seats, a hefty amount go to MCC members and AFL members, and then thousands also go to Medallion Club members and AFL contractual obligations, and then each of the sixteen (soon to be eighteen) clubs get a thousand each.
All this leaves members of the two competing clubs to scramble over 26,000 tickets – just a paltry 13,000 per club.
It’s a bad enough figure for clubs like St Kilda and Geelong to deal with, let alone Collingwood, which boasts 57,408 members.
Now yes, club members do have the option of purchasing a higher level of membership that guarantees the right to purchase a grand final ticket. But these memberships have been known to sell out (see the Western Bulldogs this year), build up a waiting list (see Geelong the past couple of years) and cost as much as $795 (see Collingwood’s Legends membership this year).
Adding to the frustration, these packages serve to further exclude rank-and-file club members at the expense of those with deeper pockets.
It’s something that occurs all too often when you move up the ticketing chain and look at the 1,000-strong allocation each club receives.
Often, clubs will send a (sometimes large) portion of the tickets they receive back to the AFL, who then sell the ticket as part of a package through the AFL Event Office or Centre Square. This year, the cheapest Centre Square package – which included a “prime” ticket to the game and entry to a post-match function – would’ve set you back $1,750.
It’s an interesting figure, considering the face value of a prime category ticket, according to the AFL itself, is only $235. That would make the post-match function worth a lazy $1,515.
Often, too, clubs will on-sell part of their ticket allocation to a third party who may also end up charging over $1,500. Fremantle, for example, list 830 of their 1,000 tickets as going to “on-sellers”.
They aren’t alone either, with most clubs sending at least 100 of their allocated tickets to on-sellers.
The other troubling way clubs use tickets is to sell them themselves, packaged with a function of their own. Now, in a lot of cases these packages are cheaper than what you can get from the AFL’s outlets, but that doesn’t guarantee you won’t end up scratching your head at where all your money is actually going.
The Western Bulldogs, for example, advertise on their website their Grand Final brunch (without a ticket to the game) as costing $200. As we know, a prime seat at the game is worth $235.
Funny then, that the Bulldogs website also offers a ticket to the brunch and to the game – with nothing else included – for $1,300.
Of course, the Dogs aren’t the only club doing this. They just provide one of many examples of where Grand Final tickets are ending up instead of going to members of the competing teams.
This week, in a very rare move for someone associated with an AFL club, Collingwood chief Gary Pert said that clubs might just be willing to cop a reduction in their allocation so that those members don’t miss out.
Unfortunately, the story was given only a few paragraphs in the Herald Sun, and that’s about it.
Hopefully, though, the AFL seriously consider the message Pert is sending, and the message of genuine fans who’ve missed out on tickets. It’s time for the AFL to, at the very least, cut back the club allocation.
Ideally, the “legal scalping” would be stamped out, but at this stage, anything to boost the allocation to members of competing clubs is a natural place to start.