Bristol Bears rake-in-revenue initiative

Article posted by Coliseum, July 25^th, 2024

Image: Coliseum GSVA

The Premiership Rugby team Bristol Bears will play a home Premiership fixture at Cardiff’s (UK) Principality Stadium next season.

‘BBC SPORT’ stated that the match on May 10^th will be against an as-yet unnamed opponent and will feature in Round 16 of the league campaign.

The Bristol Bears are a professional rugby union club based in Bristol, England (UK). They play in Premiership Rugby, England’s top division of rugby.

The Ashton Gate Stadium is a multiuse stadium in Ashton Gate, Bristol, England (UK) and is the home of the Bristol City football club and the Bristol Bears rugby union team. Located in the South-West of the City, just South of River Avon, it currently has an all-seated capacity of 27,000.

The 74,500-capacity Millennium Stadium, known since 2016 as the Principality Stadium for sponsorship reasons, is the national stadium of Wales. Located in Cardiff (UK) it is the home of the Wales national rugby union team and has also held Wales national football team games.

‘BBC SPORT’ further stated that branded as the ‘Big Day Out’ by the Bears, the match will see them swap their 27,000-capacity Ashton Gate for the 75,000-seater South Wales venue for the first time in a bid to “reach new audiences and grow our commercial revenue”.

The 2024-2025 Premiership rugby campaign will start in September 2024 and will end in June 2025.

The Premiership Rugby teams Harlequin F.C. and Saracens F.C. have played an annual showpiece Premiership match each at the 82,000-capacity Twickenham Stadium in Twickenham, England, and at the 62,850-capacity Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in North London in recent campaigns, a template Bristol says they want to replicate.

Observed Gavin Marshall, Chief Executive of Bristol Sport, “It’s massive for us to take a game to a venue like the Principality Stadium. We’ve made some headway in recent years but we are still posting significant losses and we need to find ways to drive revenue streams and we believe this is one of the ways we can do that.”

Bristol (UK)-based Bristol Sport promotes access to professional sport and participation in sport across all age and capability ranges. It is part of a stable of sports companies owned by Stephen Lansdown.

The Bristol Bears has explored the possibility of playing at the Principality Stadium previously with a fixture between the Bears and the West Country rivals Gloucester Rugby floated last season.

The Welsh Rugby Union boss Nigel Walker said at the time that Welsh Rugby needed to “look at ways of increasing revenues without harming any of the existing infrastructures and fabric of the game”.

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