Ireland, admittedly, doesn't seem like the ideal place for an American country artist to begin his epic comeback. Garth Brooks, however, is a man that knows what he's doing. The country star announced that he would be performing three shows at Croke Park in Dublin on July 25, 26 and 27. His reasoning seems to have been solid, as both shows sold out within 90 minutes when tickets went on sale Friday morning.
The reason for the Irish shows was to return to the site of one of the performer's biggest concerts to date: Brooks played a show at Croke Park in 1997 before a reported crowd of 130,000. According to the stadium's website, the venue seats 82,300. The '97 show-which was featured on Brooks' 2006 DVD The Entertainer-also featured a huge number of fans on the field.
Brooks' website reports that 240,000 tickets were sold between the three dates. Brooks is about as good as it gets when comes to PR, and of course he sells it as all "love the music" very well. That may be true, but he makes sure he'll make a buck in the process, from his long-running Las Vegas residency to releasing his recent compilation Blame It On My Roots exclusively at Walmart. Tickets for the July shows start at $88.77. Assuming that every ticket cost the same (which of course, they didn't), Brooks' shows will generate at least $21.3 million over three days. Plus memorabilia revenue.
Reports from Irish news outlets suggested that fans were literally camped out for days at Ticketmaster outlets, and many a price was gauged.
"Bob Doyle, my long-term manager, was talking about our recent Vegas shows and he said, 'if you are going to make a comeback, you've got to do a special. Something that is huge,'" Brooks said at a press conference announcing the shows. "We said Dublin, Ireland, Croke Park in a fully reconstructed stadium. I said that totally joking, but we started to get into it."
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