I raised this a fews weeks back about the tickets available for the Red Star CL home match. That was a Catagory C game yet the cheapest ticket was £40 plus £1.75 booking fee. There are a set number available at this price (inthe old paxton end) then they ranged from £55 to £60 in the South Stand and are from £62 to £65 plus in the East and West stands. All of these have the £1.75 booking fee to be added on. These are just regular seats not flash ones. I have just looked for me and my daughters to go to see Norwich category C game would be £119.25 for 2 adults and a young adult. That is the cheapest tickets in the North stand. If we went to the south stand (as we usually did in the old whl) it would cost us £170.25 as there are no young adult seasts available. Remember, these sre the chespest matches you can go to. In 2016 I bought 2 adult tickets and a junior ticket for spurs v hull and spurs v Burnley ... that is 6 tickets and with booking fees it came to £91 per match...now just 3 years on the cheapest I could do it for one match is £117 and if I had been to wait til pay day it would have cost £170. There were 10,000 empty seats for thd Red Star match! I suspect the ticket pricing will need to be looked at. If it stays like this we will be lucky to make 3 or 4 games a season and I suspect many others are in the same position.
Red Star attendance was 51,743 and there weren't many away fans, despite the fact that there shouldn't have been any at all. I doubt that will have concerned Levy, to be honest. The prices are excessive, but people are paying them. The newness of the stadium and the tourists for Son in particular will maintain this for a while. We'll see if it lasts. Our current form will probably ensure that it doesn't.
This is the one thing where I’m personally very “anti-Levy” on. I’m generally a pro-Levy type of guy as I think he does a lot more good than bad but his pricing for fans is disgusting. I’ve already said I won’t pay much more for my season ticket should they decide to up the prices. I pay £995 now, the max I think I’ll pay is £1100. If it happens to exceed that I'm packing it in. The atmosphere at the new stadium is dog ****, yeah it goes loud if we score but that doesn’t make an atmosphere good. Fans are turning up with too many expectations (and rightly so for the price) that one mistake, one conceded goal gets a pretty load groan and as we saw against Watford at HT, there was a raucous of boos ringing out around the place. There’s no need to fleece fans, none whatsoever and by doing so, you increase the chances of a poisonous atmosphere.
I agree with your general point, but I think that the Watford game was a response to several things. Poor team selection and a poor half contributed, as did our generally **** form, but the boos felt like they were aimed at the officials, at least in part. The excessive timewasting and unpunished bullshittery drew a response that we don't usually get, even when we're worse. The fans are paying a lot of money to attend. We don't want to spend that time watching Ben Foster standing next to a ball.
Levy charging extortionate ticket prices, I bet he doesnt put any more pound notes into the transfer budget.
The only thing that can turn us into a power house is creating more longterm income to spend on the squad. The only possible source of this income either directly or indirectly is the fans.
Still one of the best quotes from Uli Hoeness: 'We could charge more than £104. Let's say we charged £300. We'd get £2m more in income but what's £2m to us? 'In a transfer discussion you argue about that sum for five minutes. But the difference between £104 and £300 is huge for the fan. 'We do not think the fans are like cows, who you milk. Football has got to be for everybody. 'That's the biggest difference between us and England.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ For the record, £104 refers to Bayern's cheapest season ticket and IIRC this quote is about 5 years old and as of 2018 Bayern had froze their prices for the fifth season running, not sure if it's increased in the last year or so but I can't imagine it'd be too much more even if it did..
Well we know he made Dinamo Zagreb pay for five Modric shirts which total to circa £200 back then, so you can bet your life he argues over £2m for longer than five minutes
But in all seriousness you’d have thought they could have still made a hell of a lot more in matchday revenue without fleecing the fans on tickets, especially the non-Cat A games. After all the F&B in the stadium is pretty reasonable but by all accounts they’re making a killing because of increased foot traffic, faster service etc. It’s disappointing because I do feel it’s affected the atmosphere a bit at the stadium, the fans who traditionally went often and sat with family/friends etc are being priced out. The ticket exchange is great on one hand but it does encourage a ‘renting’ idea - I think a lot of people have bought STs with the intention to go to 5/6 big games every year (and ‘consume’ the atmosphere and experience rather than contributing to it) and just sell on the rest. This damages the togetherness of fans and I reckon these tickets often aren’t sold on if they’re in the West stand, for example, making more empty seats and lost revenue for the club on non-ticket revenue as well. The system is great for someone like me who doesn’t have an ST and therefore relies on borrowing directly from family or friends on the off chance they can’t make the game, or now using the exchange as well. But I don’t think it’s helped the atmosphere when combined with the high cost of tickets.
I guess one benefit of us being **** is that ST prices may drop for next season if we're not in European competition and the novelty of the new stadium has worn off. Wait, who am I kidding?!
£2m a year is roughly the difference between us signing Sadio Mane and him choosing Liverpool instead.
If we were in the Bayern Munich position in England (ie as powerful as the next 3 clubs put together) then I would try to match that. As it is we need every penny we can muster.
Tbh the club will become a souless entity if it pushes away the bulk of their fans. I accept higher prices for Category A games, I accept shirt prices, I accept high memorabilia prices, I accept a high proportion of corporate and very expensive seats and I accept Sunday dinners at £59 ahead...but I do not accept that those of us with a modest income should be financially pushed aside. IF they push the majority who can not afford £170 to go with their uni and 6th form kids to watch us play Burnley, Norwich, Bournemouth, Sheffield United etc then they will at least two generations of fans that attend games and will end up in a half empty brand new ground. Plastics and corporates will not be interested in these or EL matches or cup toies against lower league ties...and fans like us will have found something else to do with our money and time. Arsenal played in the the EL last week in front of a half empty stadium. It looked bloody awful. Even our CL game have around 10,000 empty seats. Football clubs are about the fans, not just the better off fans but all of us. To go from £90 for me and my daughters to attend a category C match 3 years ago to a minmum of £120 (if I am lucky enough to get one of the few cheapers tickets) or up to £170 if not, is unwarranted and short sighted. This ain't a dig at you btw but pushing out the likes of us is leaves the club at the wim of tourists, plastics and corporate types. They do not know our songs, our history...they do not understand the real joy of a late equaliser, they do not chat to the youngster near them about days gone by, they do not support the club through thick and thin and they do not get why we sing "can't smile without out you" or about "ossie going to wembley" and they have no idea who the hslf time guests are...and they are not Tottenham til they die...they are there for the short term, glamour game and the posh grub. These people are financially needed but not at the expense of us...and that's what these prices are doing.
Dortmund's cheapest season ticket is also very cheap, around £185. Leipzig's is around £170. German football teams treat their fans as fans, not customers and it's no real surprise the German support is generally a very vocal one, working class people can afford to support and watch their favourite teams. With the money English football is now making, especially for teams like us who have been playing in the CL, I really don't think there's any excuses to be fleecing fans nowadays.
I generally agree with most of that but I don't know what the solution is. If the whole PL went for cheap tickets like in Germany then we could afford to as well. But with very low ticket prices, I can't see how the economics for the new stadium would work unless they charged even more for premium seats to subsidise the poorer fans (which would be fine with me but they did a lot of research before setting the prices). By the way, I was never able to get a Season Ticket until we left WHL and could have got one from then onwards. Instead I went for a Premium Seat. In my experience there are not many 'plastics'....there are quite a few proper Spurs fans who simply are prepared to pay for the better seats and the posh grub. At least half of them sing. I expect to renew my seat every season irrespective of results. I was a working class boy but got a good education and got very lucky with my career.
Out of morbid curiosity I looked for La Liga season ticket prices to see how they stacked up against the Bundesliga...and ended up wondering if some clubs knew what the word "cheapest" meant in regards to their ticket prices given the cheapest ticket prices are as follows... Alaves - €250 Bilbao - €300 Atletico - €250 Barcelona - €167 Betis - €195 Celta Vigo - €250 Levante - €145 Los Ladrones - €223 Sevilla - €350 Valencia - €190 Obviously those are still cheaper than ours, but are they better value? Yes, Alaves, I'm mainly looking at you when I ask this...
I don't think that any rich fan is plastic ... but there are people at the games who are not fans...they are there for the experience and that makes them plastics/tourists. There are seats for sale by the clubs partners (regular seats) for hundreds of pounds for ever match and when they can't sell them they get released to members...that's how we got tickets to the City CL match. I repeat ... I get they need for more expensive tickets and the premium stuff but the club are pricing fans out by not having cheaper seats at category C matches. There were no free seats for the Bayern Munich game but 10,000 empty seats for the Red Star match...the plastics/tourists were not interested in the Red Star match as it was not a glamour game but it was too expensive for many. I had a mate with a kid who did not go cos of the cost who otherwise would. There are only 7000-9000 tickets available for members (42,000 Season Tickets and 11,000 premium and sponsorship seats)... lowering ticket prices by a tenner all over would mean £600,000 less per home game...the idea that this would inhibit us is wrong. For 30 matches (19 league, 6 CL, 5 doestic cups) it would be £18m less a year. However that would be great lessened by the additional sales (10,000 last Tuesday for example, plus food, drink and programme sales). I repeat that this sint about slagging of better paid fans...it is sbout the club protecting thousands of fans being priced out. 10,000 empty seats for a CL match should be a huge wake up call. Can you imagine what a EL attendance would be like if they have pushed away people like me? At WHL they charged £15 for adults and £5 for kids yet we never got more than 30,000 ... often less than 28,000.
