North of Ireland (h) - November 15th

Had a good chuckle on this 

Clark was axed FYI

There isn't much information on the break-even cost of opening a stadium, or at least not a lot in the public domain - however, the GAA did do such a study for Croker back in 2004 and it was reported that the magic number there was 34,000, roughly 50% capacity. Obviously that is a long time ago now, but costs have probably increased at a greater rate than income with all the various health & safety regulations since then. 

The rule of thumb here is that the bigger the stadium, the greater percentage the fixed costs are, so the Aviva not being as big as CP, it may be a bit less than the 50% (26k for Aviva) figure for CP. I'd imagine the FAI cup final is probably run on a break even basis or close enough to it one way or another- as in I wouldn't think its a huge money spinner for the FAI, but they are probably not losing anything much most years by having it there either, particularly recently where the attendances have generally been between the 20K & 30K mark. 

I recall about ten years ago hearing that the GAA figure for Croker was basically a million per game to open it. There are so many costs you don't even think of - for instance, both stadiums take so much power that they need extra generators running on match days. Ordinarily, yeah, they don't need generators and can draw from the grid but on match days they have huge generators in the basement running away. You can actually see the ones in Croker from the bridge over the canal on Jones's Road. This is particularly so where the stadium has to be floodlit for many hours. Now that's only one expense of many but there are certain expenses that have to be incurred regardless of the attendance, or certainly where there are sizeable expenses that only increase slightly as attendance increases.

Obviously things like staffing can be predicted and balanced to match attendance but there are so many more expenses beyond that. Even if it is still a million euro a game, that takes 20,000 at €50 a ticket average. And that's a figure from years ago, so it is likely quite a few more than that, especially given the increased costs involved with night games than day games (even aside from electricity, I imagine they have to pay more to the Gardai given the extra overtime).