THE GAA ARE considering moving next year’s hurling league final to September, to coincide with the Ryder Cup at Adare Manor and thus to parade our great game to the world and, more importantly, America.

We’ll have to wait to see if that happens, what we do know is that the event will be in keeping with some of the less desirable aspects of rip-off Ireland – and modern sporting administrators’ capacity to shake down the paying public for every cent they can.

Ticket prices for Adare Manor are a record high for a European venue for a Ryder Cup, with admission for a tournament day starting at €499, a giant leap from the €260 charged to get in the gates in Rome in 2023.

Tournament organisers have defended their pricing, pointing out that it’s cheaper than the €642 ($750) charged for the Bethpage edition of 2025, that one can get practice day tickets from €89, and, rather vaguely, that “a lot has happened in the world” since the Rome edition. 

Capitalist

But of course the real reason ticket prices are priced so high is because the organisers know they can get away with it, following the logic of a sports ticketing market that in the last few years has gone berserk under the capitalist principle that all that matters is what one can do, rather than what one should do. 

This is a logical development of the repackaging of sport as an entertainment product, and where once this fact was leveraged to sell TV subscriptions, it is now being used to justify wildly expensive ticket prices.

This is partly because the value of TV rights has finally plateaued. The top clubs in the Premier League and Champions League, for instance, have lately found that their biggest areas of revenue growth are in ticketing and commercial income.

This is of a piece with the wider boom in what has been called “the experience economy”, perhaps driven partly because people want something more immersive amid the alienation of spending so much of our lives online.

Or perhaps that going to these events will provide plenty of content to allow people curate their online life into something of which others will continue to be jealous. 

Sports organisations have been keen to present themselves as a bastion of the experience economy, which is why Richard Atkinson, the European Tour’s chief Ryder Cup officer, has justified the pricing as “proportionate to a global sporting event”. 

Hence major events have been redesigned as belonging to a certain A-list category of events to which you have to get to at some point in your life; transmuted into a moveable kind of tourist destination. This is why you will have heard Fifa president Gianni Infantino yammering on so often about the expanded 2026 World Cup as consisting of “104 Super Bowls”.

Of course, DR Congo versus Uzbekistan does not remotely meet the threshold of a Super Bowl, while the entire value of the Super Bowl is its scarcity and that there is no more than one in a single year. But Fifa are not really going for any kind of descriptive accuracy here: they are using it as a rhetorical device to justify their historically expensive tickets. 

The Ryder Cup has also positioned itself as a cousin of these mega events to justify their ticket prices, too, knowing that they will find golf fans of sufficient wealth to buy the tickets, even if there are so many of them coming from the US as to possibly mitigate against Europe’s home advantage. 

Fans at Bethpage last year. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Plenty of seasoned Ryder Cuppers are consoling those now priced out by reassuring them that the tournament is actually a pretty poor spectator experience, given the size of the crowds, the sheer lack of golf played on the course, and the river of corporate sponsors allowed inside the ropes and occluding views. There is truth to all of this, but all the same, the pricing of the tickets is another instance of a major sporting event telling a large swathe of its fans that, actually, you do not have a real stake in this, because you’re too poor for us to be worrying about you. 

The Ryder Cup is far from a one-off in this respect, even in an Irish context: Croke Park has become a site for Oasis and the NFL to tell their Irish fans the same thing. 

This modern sporting phenomenon of fans left feeling alienated from the events they love because other people are better off really is a terrible thing.