NZ Football obviously have planeloads of money to throw around.
This seems like a coach's ego trip to me.
This seems like someone who doesn't like Hay looking for reasons to be negative actually.
People complain we have no games... we organise games against England and Belgium and that isn't good enough! Even if it is financially not prudent it still wouldn't be Hay's fault, of course a coach wants games and his job isn't to work out the financial pro/cons!
I also suspect it's possibly cheaper than having a game in NZ since we are using euro based players and not having to cover the cost of an overseas team coming here for a one off match.