That meant limited time to market the game, while New Zealand Football was unable to shift a lot of local club fixtures in the afternoon, which left some regular fans compromised. But Becker has no doubt the A-League missed a trick with its pricing.<\/p>\n
Auckland FC’s knockout match against Melbourne City didn’t sell out on Saturday. Photo \/ Photosport<\/p>\n
\u201cThey got their ticket pricing strategy completely wrong \u2013 and they have admitted that\u201d Becker told the Herald. \u201cThe reality is, in this market and at a time where there\u2019s a cost-of-living crisis, families have to be very thoughtful as to how they spend their money. The cheapest adult ticket was about $45 and that\u2019s not acceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Herald has also been told that fans who tried to purchase tickets on game day were only offered limited options \u2013 of around $60 or $80 \u2013 despite most of the stadium still being available, while there were also glitches with the online ticketing system.<\/p>\n
\u201cI completely understand why we didn\u2019t get a great crowd,\u201d Becker said. \u201cI was personally very disappointed about it and also frustrated, because we didn\u2019t have a huge amount of control over what could be done and we certainly had no power over the marketing or pricing side of things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finals are different to the regular-season scenario. During the playoffs, the A-League nominally takes charge of all the marketing and promotion of matches and retains all profits from ticketing revenue. It also covers the costs of accommodation and flights for visiting teams, whereas during the season, only flights are covered.<\/p>\n
In the wake of the match, it\u2019s understood there were forthright discussions between the A-League powerbrokers and the club on Sunday. Becker didn\u2019t want to discuss what was a private meeting, only saying that Auckland FC \u201cwere firm with our position, thoughts and feedback\u201d.<\/p>\n
And there has been a positive resolution since.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe talked to them and to their credit, they held their hand up and said, \u2018let\u2019s fix it\u2019. This time around, the majority of the tickets are priced at $30 for an adult and $15 for a kid, so a family of four can come for $90. Given what it costs to put on a game and everything around it, that\u2019s a very reasonable price, very affordable, especially with the level of entertainment that\u2019s on offer, both on the pitch and the match-day experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
So far, the signs are good for the first leg of the semi-final this Saturday (6pm) against Adelaide. More than 7000 tickets were snapped up on Monday \u2013 the first day they were available for sale \u2013 and Becker hopes they can hit the 20,000 mark for the match.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt will be much better,\u201d he said. \u201cThe ticketing issue\u2019s been sorted and you can\u2019t have a better advert for the game than what we saw last Saturday. We\u2019ll come up against a very exciting, attacking team in Adelaide and we\u2019ve got a great rivalry and all the matches have been competitive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michael Burgess<\/a> has been a Sports Journalist for the New Zealand Herald since 2005, covering the Olympics, Fifa World Cups, and America\u2019s Cup campaigns. He is a co-host of the Big League podcast<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That meant limited time to market the game, while New Zealand Football was unable to shift a lot…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":412705,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[74,27500,51,99548,4282,3019,12857,11728,15441,159787,26845,5904,49640,685,1031,13085,1073,9812,111,139,6933,69,1118,89431,7254,29848,9366,15749,108573,17893,312,213,16674,656,6035,10507,25152],"class_list":["post-412704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-after","tag-aleague","tag-auckland","tag-becker","tag-boss","tag-clash","tag-completely","tag-critical","tag-crowd","tag-elimination","tag-fc","tag-final","tag-finals","tag-last","tag-marketing","tag-matches","tag-media","tag-needs","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nick","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-playoff","tag-policy","tag-poor","tag-pricing","tag-promotion","tag-reconsider","tag-saturdays","tag-says","tag-sports","tag-stadium","tag-strategy","tag-things","tag-ticket","tag-wrong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412704\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}