Ticket prices for Swedish games reduced

05 May 2012 | Fredrik Pålsson

After the bad attendance numbers in yesterday's World Championship games in Stockholm, the organizers have decided to reduce the ticket prices for Sweden's games and take other actions to bring more fans to the arenas.

At a press conference in Stockholm, representatives of the Swedish Ice Hockey Association and the World Championship Organizing Comittee announced that ticket prices will be lowered for the games in Sweden to bring more fans to the Globe Arena in Stockholm.

Swedish Ice Hockey Association chairman Christer Englund said, "We have, of course, responded to the critics of the price levels. It doesn't feel good that we don't have a full arena when Sweden plays. We can now note that the prices don't meet the expectations of the fans. We set those prices a year and a half ago and, at that time, we believed they were fair based on what we knew then."

The decision now is that 2400 tickets for all Swedish games will have their prices reduced from 1295 and 795 SEK to 395 SEK. These are tickets in the middle price category that have had almost no sales. In response to the question as to why nothing has been done earlier, the answer was that they believed more tickets would be sold on the days leading up to the games. Instead, only around 500 tickets were sold the last three days before the Sweden-Norway game.

It's also notable that the ticket prices for Finland's games in Helsinki are higher, yet still brought a good number of fans to Finland-Belarus yesterday.

For the games not involving Sweden, the organizers don't see the prices as the main issue, so no price change will be done for these games. Instead they will work in other ways to bring fans to these games. As an example, there were over 3000 tickets for yesterday's Germany-Italy game that were pre-sold as part of packages, but just over a thousand turned up for the game. Actions to improve the attendance involve trying to get youth and hockey teams to the games.

The tickets status for tonight's game between Sweden and the Czech Republic is around 8000 tickets sold, while the Sweden-Russia is sold out.

Sweden will be the main host for next year's event and there has already been questions as to whether that tournamnt will be plagued with the same poor attendance numbers.

"Of course, we will evaluate that between now and next year," Englund said.