Piece from independent www.independent.co.uk/sport/gene ... 60091.html

Piece from independent www.independent.co.uk/sport/gene ... 60091.html

The tournament hasn't even started yet. Plenty more tickets will be sold between now and right up to the final.

Plenty of work still to do, but they real marketing is about to begin, even with a TV ad. Ticket sales will only increase and hopefully pass the figure mentioned above.

Due to no direct Motorway & having to zig zag across various B roads its easier to get to London from Barrow as it is to get to Hull from Barrow.

Calculatory errors notwithstanding, if the 280k figure is valid, more people have bought tickets in advance for this year's event than attended in total either of its UK predecessors.

The real marketing is about to begin?

Seriously?

With less than 3 weeks before it kicks off?



And what will that marketing consist of exactly?

Adult tickets available for £5 and £7.50 provided people use the promo code "lessthan3weeks"?

What are the targets?

To beat the 2000 World Cup total and average attendance figures which were a disaster?

You could put it like that, yes, except it's 6% more and there were 7 more games in 2000.....as for the average attendance at this RLWC, I would suggest that the eventual figure will be close to 15,000 per game (360k) which will be hailed as an overwhelming success by those at the RFL who wish to remain at the trough....





What Historical context is that then? This is being billed by the organisers as the biggest sporting event in England since the Olympic games and the organisers finally announced in [url=http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/news/rugby-league-world-cup-ticket-sales-please-organisers-152503350.htmlApril that they had a target of 500,000 ticket sales[/url.With less than 3 weeks to go, they have hit 56% of that target and I do not see that as anything to celebrate.

Tickets will of course be snapped up in the next few weeks, but they have only shifted 80,000 since their "40%" press release nearly 4 months ago......another 80,000 would be a decent result given their ineptitude to date and would deliver a 72% hit rate on their 500k target....and let's face it, the more people who see the games in person the better, because I doubt Premier Sports will be knocking on the doors of BARB looking to get their ratings published.

BTW, are you one of those who believes the stable of partners that the RLWC 2013 has delivered more than the £1,000,000 in sponsorship cash that the 2000 event did? If so, I have some bad news regarding the toot fairy and Santa Clause....


13 years later, more fans, more exposure and yet nobody wants to touch the biggest sporting event in the UK since the Olympics.....yeah, the organisers are doing a splendid job

If they're at 280,000 now I think that's a fair effort and the 500k target isn't out of reach. I think we'll see another 10-15,000 shifted for the opener before kick off, at least that and probably more for the semi's and the rest of the tickets for the final (probably around 20,000). That will edge us towards 350,000.

After that I'd guess not many tickets will have been shifted for the quarter finals as nobody knows who will be playing where and when so I think it' safe to say there's a good number to be added from that.

Add in all the sales for the other group games (especially the England ones) and I think things are looking pretty rosy.

Yep, the disaster that was the 2000 World Cup had a naming sponsor... Lincoln Financial Group... to the tune of £1,000,000.

The game can only dream about such sponsorship deals today.

And yet the competition made a loss of £2m!

correct and this one we were told will make a profit.

Mind you, we were told that at the same time we were also told they'd shift 500,000 tickets, so with 220,000 left to go, exactly how much profit remains to be seen.

Interesting that the 1995 world cup drew at total of 265,000 - yet it had less than 50,000 tickets pre-sold before the first game apparently. The fact that RL will have this sort of coverage over 6 weeks and we won't sell more than a few thousand tickets is laughable.

As someone mentioned, no-one will buy QF tickets until the tournament is underway. We will sell at least a further 60,000 tickets at Cardiff, Wembley and OT alone. Some of the pre-sales (17k at Huddersfield, 15k at Avignon, 8k at Rochdale, 5k for Scotland games at Workington FFS) is absolutely unprecedented. RL fans are notoriously lazy beggars too - they always leave it until the last minute.