When a long-standing Scotland season ticket holder publicly does the maths on his renewal, it tends to make a noise. This week the figure was £980 - and the fan in question said he was, for the first time in years, actively thinking about walking away.
The episode was picked up on the rugby analysis channel MartsViews, which used the comment as a starting point for a wider argument: that the squeeze on rugby ticket prices in the UK is not driving fans out of the sport entirely, but is reshaping what the sport looks like outside the showpiece weekends.
"People aren't giving up rugby. They're just choosing the big moments only, which means everything else starts to feel, well, less important," MartsViews argued.
That last clause is where the issue sharpens. If supporters are still willing to pay for a Calcutta Cup, a Six Nations finale, a marquee autumn international against the All Blacks - and if they are saying no to friendlies, regional fixtures and the grind of a Pro fixture in February - then the pyramid that sits underneath those moments starts to wobble.
For Scottish Rugby in particular, the timing is delicate. Murrayfield revenue underwrites the union's wider operation, including the two professional sides at Edinburgh and Glasgow Warriors. If the marginal supporter starts to skip everything outside Six Nations weekend, the cumulative impact on a season's takings can be substantial - even if total attendance at the headline games still looks healthy.
The £980 figure is itself instructive. It is not, in the context of a year of rugby, a wildly out-of-line number when broken down per fixture. But supporters do not budget per fixture; they budget per pay packet. And in a UK cost-of-living environment that has spent two years tightening household discretionary spending, a near four-figure outlay for one of several leisure subscriptions has become a very different conversation than it was even three years ago.
What is starting to surface, anecdotally and now publicly, is a flight to the top. Internationals - especially the Calcutta Cup, the autumn Tier 1 fixtures and the Six Nations cluster - continue to command full houses. Mid-table URC weeks, women's internationals played at smaller venues, and warm-up Tests increasingly do not.
That is the pattern MartsViews was warning about: not a collapse, but a hollowing. The middle of the calendar - the part that used to define a fan's relationship with the sport - is being squeezed out by a value calculation in which only the marquee survives.
There are responses unions can make. Tiered season tickets that price down off-marquee weeks. Family bundles. Standing terraces, which have gradually crept back into UK stadium debate. Lower-priced URC ticketing aligned with what football clubs in the same cities can charge. None of those are silver bullets - and none of them solve the underlying issue, which is that elite rugby is competing for the same household pound that streaming services, subscription gyms and overseas holidays are.
For now, the season ticket holder cited by MartsViews is in the same position thousands of supporters across the home nations are in: doing the sums on a renewal, and not arriving at the answer their union would want.
The risk is not that he gives up rugby. He almost certainly will not. The risk, as MartsViews framed it, is that he goes to two games a year instead of fifteen - and the regular season, the part of the calendar that pays the wages of the players he is supposedly turning up to support, fades quietly into the background.
