Higher Ticket Prices Mean Lower Attendance For The Lions

The organizers of South African Rugby are under fire for selling seats in the Tests for about 85 pounds. The British and Irish Lions played their warm-ups to stadiums that only had half of the seats filled. This is up from an average of 10 to 35 pounds. South Africa rugby chiefs say that they would have re-though the prices of the tickets had they known about the economy, according to Andy Marinos, SA's acting rugby chief. He said that when they consulted the hosting provinces and their ticket agency last year, everyone agreed that these prices were correct.

British and Irish Lions Limited requested an average of 11,000 tickets for each of the test matches, and weren't able to sell those. Marino said that the average match attendance for all of the ten upcoming fixture is expected to be about 35,000, a figure is higher than for either of the last two tours that Lion's made. It may be that fans are not enthusiastic about supporting local teams and pick-up squads that don't have any of their star players – the ones that normally attract them to spend money on tickets – playing.

According to fans, the “hospitality packages” offered by the Lions at four – sometimes five times the value of regular test match ticket prices just aren't worth it, even with the inclusion of a three course lunch, parking, a memorabilia item and a premium bar plus snacks after the match. They claim that greed has played a large part in the Lion's decision making process and that the economic downturn has simply been ignored. These fans just wanted to watch some rugby at a fair price.