This will be lost on those who've never been to a game in their life but I'll post it anyway. My first ever game was Bolton Wanderers v United at Burnden Park in, I think, 1978. My dad took me and we sat in the Lever End, by all accounts it cost a total of ten bob, which is 50p. (United got hammered 3-0 by the way) Fast forward to now, I have just got tickets to take my own seven year old son to his first game, which will be Swansea City v Arsenal at the end of the month. The cost? £70.50!!!!! Now I'm no economist but I am guessing that's a bit above inflation. In other words, it's a ****ing rip off of the highest order. Swansea, to their shame, categorise matches so Arsenal is cat A and so therefore they bump up the price. This is an insult to Swans fans as they are being asked to pay more because the opposition is supposed to be better. No doubt the club use additional policing as an excuse but considering how much money they get from Sky they should pay that themselves, why the hell should the supporter do it? It isn't just Swansea though and the point is that soon enough football will **** itself up the arse to the point that it is completely unsustainable. Imagine your Super top mega tastic Sunday and there's no one in the ground watching the game? Not so super then, eh? Without match going fans, football is nothing. Th(o)ughts?
Fans are not needed now, they make ££££ from Sky and sponsership. I refuse to go due to excessive costs, except Kiddy Harriers, as thats my home team from where I was born
My first visit at OT I paid £2 (that's a long time ago too). The reality is that these days gate revenue is only a small proportion of the overall income of big clubs. Sponsorships and TV revenues dwarf these and it would make sense to keep these ticket prices reasonable so that a broad range of fans can go to see the match. A half empty or quiet stadium is no good for neither the sponsors nor TV...
Two quid was about 1983 or 84 if memory serves. My own first season ticket cost less than £35. Fans are not yet priced out of the market because it remains a bit of a novelty so for now there is always someone wanting to go see a match but it will wear off. Grounds need to be full to keep up the pretence that what sky are selling is as good as they claim. If clubs don't do it (reduce admission) they'll not have a product to sell and whole house of cards collapses.
It's changed so fast as well, my club (Everton) are amongst the cheapest ST's in the league, but they're still a lot of money in real terms. I remember still paying cash at the turnstiles in '94 & I think it was £8.
Without fans in the ground, there'd be no massive TV deals or sponsorship, as who'd sit at home watching a game played in an empty arena?
It's simple economics. Supply and demand and shortages. Football is much bigger now that it was in the 1970s, but the ground capacities haven't gone up that much, particularly after the move to all seaters. Most of the big clubs have waiting lists and shortages of tickets - they could easily sell more tickets at the current price if the grounds were bigger. Therefore at the current price level there is a shortage of supply. People keep saying clubs have to drop the prices or the attendances will fall, but year on year the prices go up and the attendances stay high. So why would the clubs drop the prices just to throw money away? Look at the most expensive clubs in the BBC survey - Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs, Liverpool and Utd. All of them sell out to around 99% capacity in pretty much every game, and all of them bar Arsenal are trying to expand their grounds. They know for every fan who turns down a ticket on the grounds of price there will be another one willing to pay that much. Then look at the cheapest - Newcastle United, Cardiff, Norwich and City. All of them have empty seats at smaller games, ergo no waiting list, so they can't raise prices without creating more empty seats. Until fans actually start protesting ticket prices en masse, by not attending the games, the prices simply won't come down.
Using the fact that the seats are still being filled to justify the increase doesn't tell the full story though does it? As the social mix of those now attending the game has changed massively in the last decade or so, the working man is being gradually priced out of PL football & the game should do that at it's peril, as the working man brings the atmosphere & without that the game will become a sterile middle class 'event'.
I don't want to debate the relative merits of the class war, and the relative desirability of the working class 'atmosphere'. But in general I doubt it's possible to keep football as a working man's game nowadays due to the increased interest. It was possible back in the days when grounds weren't filled on a regular basis, but nowadays there simply isn't enough room for working class and middle class fans to all fit in the ground due to the increased interest in football. Ultimately the clubs won't be able to selectively sell tickets to working class people even if they wanted to, not without creating an unsavoury atmosphere in the grounds to try and scare away the middle classes, which I doubt the clubs would want to do.
Anyone who has visited Old Trafford lately will tell you the atmosphere is **** apart from at the very biggest games. This is entirely due to those going, or not going if truth be told. It's not better than it was, that's a simple truth. Apart from offering a proportion of cheaper tickets to fans within a certain radius of the ground, which will understandably piss off those not within that radius, I don't really have an answer. I am fairly certain that the novelty will wear off eventually with certain types of supporter though and ultimately ticket prices will have to drop. I'd feel sorry for Arsenal fans if they weren't such smug tossers, having to pay so much to win absolutely **** all. It's scandalous.
Not true in any way. Newcastle are known for their brilliant support and I don't think I've ever seen them on the tele with a low attendance? Their average is 50,517 for last year! Norwich's lowest was only 800 less than their highest, and Man City's difference was around 1800. As a Cardiff fan our average attendance was over 22k last year in the championship (capacity around 26k). We haven't hiked our prices up despite us now being in the Premier League. I'm sure we'd still sell out if we pushed prices up because we have a huge catchment area.
People conveniently forget that you can watch Arsenal for £25.50.For this season they have opened a new enclosure for 12-16yr olds which will cost them £10 for a ticket
It's perfectly possible to have affordable ticket prices for sections of grounds if clubs CHOOSE to do it. Every PL club could afford to reduce it's ticket prices by £50 per seat, per game & would still be making the same as they were before the latest hike in TV revenue.............. I'm not suggesting they should or would do that of course, but equally they should seek to maintain a sensible price level, before the game becomes the sole preserve of the middle class, who will never be as staunch as some of those who's seats they're filling.....
I didn't say any of them had low attendances, I said they had empty seats. Newcastle's capacity is 52,400, so they had an average of almost 2,000 empty seats per game. And didn't they only get around 44,000 against Wigan last year? Compare that to a club like Arsenal, whose lowest attendance saw them have just 500 empty seats, or West Ham whose lowest attendance saw they have just 70 seats free. It's not really to do with the fans, more to do with the size of the stadiums, hence my reference to shortages. Newcastle have great fans, but it's always going to be hard for them to fill the third largest stadium in the country without the success needed to attract the glory hunters. Clubs nowadays will almost always look at how to maximise revenue by adjusting their pricing based on the fans they expect to attend each game. Cardiff won't hike prices this season, but if they stay in the PL this year and are turning away thousands of fans at the turnstiles due to the low prices I think they'll put them up next year. It may not be particularly nice to think about, but the alternative for many clubs would be to set lower prices, earn less revenue than other clubs, and risk ending up getting relegated as a result.
Clubs could choose to do it, but the league is too competitive for them to ever really want to do it, unless they have a rich owner like City and the fans don't really matter that much. If one club decides to lower prices, they lose out on revenue and can't spend as much. And dropping down the table, or even being relegated, will hammer crowd levels much more than raising prices. How staunch do you think your fellow working class blues would be if Everton followed that policy, dropped prices to £5 per game, couldn't afford to pay the wage demands of many of your best players, and were relegated as a result? I doubt you'd be pulling in 36,000 fans a week in the Championship, no matter how low the prices were. I appreciate that losing revenue doesn't mean you have to drop down the table, but it always creates that risk. And no club will run that risk when the penalties are so great. The only way it would happen would be if clubs colluded to keep prices low, and none of the big clubs would ever agree that as it would hamstring them in Europe.
I'll call that point & raise you with the fact that a standing season ticket at the current European Champions costs a mere £104 this season http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/fo...ets-low-104-putting-Premier-League-shame.html It's perfectly possible for clubs to have affordable ticket pricing, if the league as a collective or individual clubs - CHOOSE to make it happen.
It is difficult to buck the law of supply and demand but IMO we need to carefully assess whether for a club like United where there is such an imbalance between the two, we should give free reign to that law. I suspect United could still double or treble the price of the tickets and the stadium might still be full. But the type/category of spectators will be changed. They will be very affluent rich middle class people earning the very top salaries. The low or middle income supporter will be totally shut out with the prospect of them or their children ever attending a match a distant dream. When/If that happens, it will be a sad day.
True, although Bayern are the financial titans of Germany, so they don't need to have high ticket prices to have a massive financial advantage over the rest of the league. I've often wondered how long the German attitude towards ticket prices would last if an oligarch took over a German club and started pumping their finances up like Abramovich or Mansour. I reckon that extra couple of million a game would suddenly become much more important if rivals started poaching players from Bayern every season, rather than the other way around. Besides which, I never said it couldn't happen, only that it wouldn't.
City have sold out all bar one home game for the last 2 seasons,the empty seats are a result of a deal with viagogo who sell on tickets in a deal with the club at inflated prices which very few people will stump up,hence the empty seats at the majority of games
