The business of a good night out

I’ve done a lot of travelling to watch sport. In the last 24 months, I’ve seen an Ashes test in Melbourne, Six Nations games in Cardiff and Rome, Racing in Sydney and Cheltenham and professional golf in Australia.

The experience of attending live sport has two common themes. Three if you count the crowds. The first is that the price of tickets continues to increase. The second is that the quality of the experience is still stuck firmly somewhere around 1985.

Are giant sports stadia across the world unaware of the alarming issues of obesity and poor health as they serve up overheated poor quality “fast food”? Is there really not an alternative to a sausage roll or a hot dog? It seems not.

Worse still, if you like a drink, in the era of craft breweries, the sports fan still has to put up with plastic glasses of expensive foamy mass produced beer. There are a few choices (lager or bitter?) but I defy anyone to taste the difference.

And of course having scalped you for the price of entry they seem ruthless in the pricing of those drinks. At the SFS last Saturday, when a good seat to watch the hapless Waratahs lose to the Stormers would set you back SEVENTY FIVE Australian dollars, they were selling plastic cups of VB at $7 a pop. There was a rule you couldn’t buy more than four, but frankly who would want to/afford to?

For the same game, the attendance was 17,000. Only 24,000 people, 1/5th of the crowd that goes to the Oaks at Flemington on a work day turned out at Randwick ($40 to get in, $170 in members!) for the best race of the year.

I think the model might be broken. but hey what do I know, I’m just a consumer planning my next trip to the Rugby World Cup…