Regarding the utilization of the Puskás Arena, one could read and hear doubts from the left for many years, and in many places even the right to exist of the Arena was doubted. However, it seems that the facility is not so unnecessary after all, as tickets are sold out not only for the matches of the Hungarian team.
Full house national football matches, Rammstein, Guns n' Roses, Depeche Mode, Halott Pénz, Hungária, triple Coldplay and a very likely triple Azahriah in the Puskás Arena. But what was it built for and for whom?
- the leader of the Fidesz-KDNP faction in Budapest raised this morning on his social media page. Zsolt Wintermantel reminded that while it was being built, the left constantly attacked the Puskás Arena investment.
Since then, however, life, as so many times, has once again refuted left-wing beliefs. After all, it soon became clear that the Puskás Aréna is not only filled with matches of the Hungarian national team:
next May, for example, Azahriah will also perform in the facility, which regularly receives a crowd of nearly 70,000 people, whose concert tickets went on sale on October 10.
Yes, but the fans snapped up 40,000 tickets for the concert on May 25, 2024 within 12 hours, so the organizers immediately announced another performance.
However, the second performance, scheduled for May 26 of next year, received even more interest from the ticket sellers than the first. What can be done in this case? The singer also announced a third concert on May 24 on his social media page. Due to the slightly confusing arrangement, during the singer's registration, many ticket holders were dissatisfied with the fact that the first concert will practically only take place after the second, so those who buy tickets later will be better off.
There is capacity, there is income, croaking voices become less frequent over time
The capacity of the Puskás Aréna as a concert venue is fifty thousand people, which - based on an average ticket price of twenty thousand forints, since ticket prices range from 9,900 to 69,000 forints - means ticket revenue of two billion forints in the case of a sold-out concert - this was calculated by Blikk in a previous article .
It is worth recalling some previous material by left-wing media that cast doubt on the right to exist of Puskás Aréna.
At the time of the stadium's handover, the dollar media calculated which city with county status could accommodate the entire population of the stadium, or which Budapest district had more people than the stadium's capacity, but another portal went so far as to state that there was no need for modern, large-capacity arenas, even not even if the Rolling Stones were to perform.
Some examples, without claiming to be complete, in the past period, similar materials could be read on the surfaces of the dollar media:
• "67,215 chairs were installed in the new Puskás Stadium. The entire population of Kaposvár could fit in. Maybe Szolnok too. If the stadium were a settlement, it would be the 13th largest in Hungary with a full house. There are ten capital districts where fewer people live than this" (444.hu)
• In another article published last month, a left-wing newspaper lamented that it costs a lot of money to maintain the turf and that "it costs a fortune to maintain the stadium, as well as to heat it and light the facility." (atlatszo.hu)
• And a third portal wrote this after the opening of the Puskás Ferenc Arena: "The Viktor Orbán Memorial, the new 67,215-seat Ferenc Puskás Stadium in Budapest was handed over on Friday." In the same article, it was noted that there is no need for stadiums for concerts either, since in 2018 "the Rolling Stones also performed at a dusty, suburban Prague airport - well, that didn't even require a "multifunctional, national space". (do that blog)
Featured image: MTI/KKBK