Christchurch has paid the All Blacks to play at the new stadium — but won’t say how much

Friday, 3 July 2026

The All Blacks make their debut at One New Zealand Stadium on Saturday night, but the cost to get them here remains unknown.

The All Blacks make their debut at One New Zealand Stadium this Saturday, when they face France in the Nations Championship — and Christchurch has paid for the privilege.

However, while the stadium’s operator has confirmed it did pay an incentive fee, it will not reveal how much.

Venues Ōtautahi, which runs the stadium, confirmed it led the bid to bring the All Blacks to the city, with costs covered by its “self-funded event attraction budget”. Chief executive Caroline Harvie-Teare said the finer details were commercially sensitive and could not be disclosed — but pushed back on previously reported figures.

“The numbers previously reported are not accurate,” she said.

The temporary stand has to be built from scratch for each event using scaffolding and in-ground fixings, and takes up to 12 days to install.

Those figures, reported in 2021 when the stadium was still being designed, suggested hosting a major All Blacks test at a 25,000-seat venue could require an incentive fee of up to $1.2 million.

With a 30,000-seat stadium, that figure was projected to be closer to $800,000. For context, Nelson paid $1m in 2018 to host a test against Argentina — a game that attracted a 21,000-person sell-out and generated an estimated $9.9m for the local economy.

Venues Otautahi chief executive Caroline Harvie-Teare said the cost is covered by its “self-funded event attraction budget”.

In 2021, Christchurch City Council’s head of recreation sport and events Nigel Cox said it might be “far smarter” to attract major games by paying a larger incentive fee rather than building to a capacity that would only be filled once a year.

Yet Saturday’s test is the only event in the calendar so far to use the stadium’s 5000 temporary seats at the northern end — the result of a $50m council decision in 2021 to build a bigger stadium.

ChristchurchNZ confirmed it had not paid anything to secure the match, though it said it had provided non-financial support including community engagement events, city “dressing” and an airport arrival mihi whakatau for the All Blacks.

Despite the unknown costs, Venues Ōtautahi estimates the game will generate $8m in economic benefit to the city from visitor spending alone.

“We know that for so many Cantabrians, the All Blacks test was the event they have been waiting for,” Harvie-Teare said. “This will be right up there as one of the most significant moments at the venue.”

Tickets sold out within four hours, with 32% of buyers coming from outside the Canterbury region.

The game kicks off at 7.10pm on Saturday under new All Blacks coach Dave Rennie.

“After the weekend, 72 days after we kicked off the first event in the venue, this will bring the total number of guests through the venue to over 317,000 and the estimated economic impact of events in the venue through visitation alone to just under $33m,” Harvie-Teare said.