NEWS:THE FIRST tickets for Real Madrid's game against Shamrock Rovers will go on sale to the Dublin club's season ticket holders at nine o'clock this morning through its website at shamrockrovers.ie with the rest of the 9,000 or so seats available for the July 20th match going on general sale at the same time on Monday.
All tickets for the game are priced €60 which club chairman Jonathan Roche concedes is “expensive”, but, he says; “This is Kaka and Ronaldo, not a Real Madrid B team and the whole Ronaldo thing has everyone gone mad.”
Roche makes the point that the ticket prices have been set by the game’s promoters, Platinum One and that Rovers are simply receiving a fee for taking part in the match. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says, “this is great for the club, about 5,000 people are going to be there who would probably never come to see Rovers play otherwise and hopefully some of them will go on to become fans. Games like this are precisely the reason some people wanted to stop the stadium being built, but it’s not our game and the finances of it are nothing to do with us.”
Platinum One chairman, Fintan Drury, also accepts the cost will be prohibitive for many but insists the restrictions on capacity are a critical issue. “When we brought Barcelona to Scotland a couple of years ago the ticket prices were very, very competitive and we’d love to be bringing Real to somewhere like Croke Park and charging €15 but that’s simply not possible at this time of year.
“The RDS, which would have given us 20,000 seats, wasn’t available either because of the horse show so the choice came down to putting a lot of seats into Tallaght and then selling tickets as reasonably as we could or simply telling Real the game couldn’t happen.”
Many of Madrid’s summer signings will be making their debuts in Dublin and Roche is positive about the international attention received to date. Rovers have also confirmed that they will be playing Newcastle United (July 11th) and Hibernian (July 27th) at Tallaght.
* Public sales for the Madrid game from Monday are through platinumone.ticketsolve.com or by phone at 01 200 616.
