About 10 million ISK loss from tonight’s game
Tonight’s national game costs the Icelandic Basketball Association fourteen million ISK.
This is confirmed by Hannes S. Jónsson, chairman of KKÍ. He has already been in Ólafssal today preparing the stadium for the evening and finishing loose ends.
The game, which starts at 8 am, is sold out. Income from ticket sales is two million ISK. It is then only permitted to advertise sponsors at national matches so that no advertising revenue is received beyond the cooperation agreements that are in force.
The game will take place in Ólafssal Haukaheimilis in Hafnarfjörður. “If we had been in Laugardalshöllinn, we might have been able to sell tickets for three million ISK more, but there is only room for 700 spectators in Ólafssal.”
Four from FIBA in quality control
The basketball federation, FIBA, sent four employees to the country in the run-up to the game to oversee the international preparations and the setting.
Hannes says that there is a lot of pressure on the federation due to the great demands that come from the international environment, and it would seem right that the treasury should be more accommodating to the high-performance sports policy of the special federations.
“We have five employees in the office in total. The smallest basketball association in the Nordic countries, after us, is Norway, where the office staff numbers seventeen people. In Finland, there are fifty employees in the office.”
Hannes says that in Iceland there needs to be a change of mindset towards the sports movement. “We need to sit down and discuss this seriously. with an important impact on working capital in general as well as performance work. There have become high demands in relation to the framework, reporting and more.”