Advance sales begin this Thursday for the fan festival on June 12th at Theresienwiese, which is intended to serve as a warm-up for the European Football Championship, which begins two days later in the Fröttmaninger Arena. And ticket sales will probably end again within a very short time. In any case, the concert organizer FKP Scorpio only planned two hours to sell 90,000 tickets. The announced Ed Sheeran, Nelly Furtado, Mark Forster and Dylan could actually have so much traction that no more tickets will go on sale.
From the point of view of city councilors from various parties, the fact that the fan festival will be a very exclusive event is also due to the admission price: 95 euros. “Many simply couldn’t afford that,” criticized the Greens; That was “anything but charitable,” complained the left.
There was a special city council resolution to only make the Theresienwiese available for the concert if lower-income citizens could also afford the visit. “The Department for Labor and Economic Affairs has included the city council’s requirement to provide a contingent of discounted tickets in the space rental agreement,” the department says succinctly.
When asked, the concert organizer, the Hamburg company FKP Scorpio, then informed the department that the 95 euros “for four full concerts by internationally successful artists were set very low” and were “already subsidized”, namely by sponsors, in this case the Deutsche Telekom and the Bitburger brewery, which also support the European Football Championship.
In comparison to other concerts in the summer, 95 euros for Ed Sheeran’s quartet actually doesn’t seem to be asking too much. For AC/DC, who are playing at the Olympic Stadium at the same time on June 12th, you pay 142 euros. Tickets for one of the ten Adele concerts at the exhibition center in August start at just 229 euros. On the other hand, you can see Andreas Gabalier in the Olympic Stadium for 60 euros, Metallica for 75 and Coldplay for 78.
The fans won’t care that the event on Theresienwiese is an idiosyncratic construction. Basically, it has no direct connection to the European Football Championship – even if it should of course be seen in their context. But the concert is not part of the official municipal supporting program for the European Championship – it is organized by the Department for Education and Sport in the Olympic Park.
The organizers get the Theresienwiese at favorable conditions
The fan zone there also has the emblem and blessing of the European Football Association Uefa. Uefa, on the other hand, which otherwise controls everything that makes money in the orbit of its tournaments, will not appear at the fan festival, but has reportedly coordinated everything with its two European Championship donors. Even tournament director Philipp Lahm is not named as a representative of the organizing committee, but only as a private citizen who initiated the concert.
The contractual partners in this case are the city’s economic department and the concert impresario FKP Scorpio with its Munich partner Pro Events. They are provided with the northern part of Theresienwiese at favorable conditions for the period from May 31st to June 17th: a daily flat rate of 572 euros for each day of assembly and dismantling, a total of 10,296 euros; In addition, there is a fixed fee of 55 cents for each square meter used on the day of the event. These are the city’s generally established tariffs.
For the advertising value in the form of beautiful pictures with Bavaria in the background, economics officer Clemens Baumgärtner (CSU) also accepts that, for once, no Munich beer will be served on the symbolic Oktoberfest site, but that beer will be carted in from the Eifel. The visitors will have to swallow that.