Simon Lloyd
(Ed’s note – The second of two articles on the ticket price debate. Running them both on the same day so we can put this subject to bed for the time being)
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it laughable that Man City fans are the ones complaining about high ticket prices? Over the last few years, their club has done more than any other to drive the price of English football beyond the reach of many ordinary fans. They have done this by massively over-inflating the transfer market and the wages paid to the players they have signed. This in turn has the knock-on effect of every agent using the latest mega deal to set the price for his own budding superstar or established player wanting a move. This current trend was started by Man Utd, when they were the richest club in the land. Chelsea then upped the ante when Abramovich took over. Now Man City have taken us to new heights, with their oil-rich owners’ mind-boggling spending.
Today, the clubs with the billionaire owners don't even negotiate to get a million or two off the price; they just pay up and move on to the next target. The clubs without billionaire owners, however, are forced either to pay the agent’s asking price, and risk the future of the club, or take a chance on a cheaper player and hope he turns out to be a bargain. Take a look around the lower divisions, and you will find they are littered with ex-premier teams who tried to keep up and failed. Leeds and Portsmouth are the two most obvious of these, but don't forget the likes of Bradford City and the Benito Carbone affair.
To try to pay for this massive outlay, clubs have continually raised prices, and, providing the team was still delivering on the pitch, and still in the Premiership, the fans kept forking out. Some teams even built massive new stadiums to try to keep up. But these teams, like the Leeds and Bradfords before them, are doomed to failure if they continue to spend way beyond the natural means of the club.
Man City are the current Premier League champions, yet on Sunday they could not sell all the tickets for an away game at Arsenal. The alleged reason for this has been the much reported £62 ticket cost. Although this is a factor, I believe a large part of the reason is that City only have a naturally medium-sized fan base. Before the oil money started rolling in, City were similar in size and stature to Chelsea. Abramovich's billions transformed Chelsea's fortunes on the pitch, but the club’s medium-sized fan base has remained more or less the same. There were a lot of overnight lifelong fans who went when they were winning the league, but they regularly failed to sell out Champions League and other cup games despite only having a capacity of about 42,000.
Arsenal, Liverpool and Man Utd all have naturally large fan bases. If a ticket for an away match is left unsold, there are usually plenty of people waiting for the chance to see an away game to buy it. This may be their only chance to see their team at an away ground during the season, and the price is just a one-off for a day out. I suspect Man City's away fans are by and large the same group who go every week, and, because the fan base is smaller, there are not many takers for an unsold ticket. The return of 900 tickets from Man City, says more about the size of the club than the cost of the ticket. Had it been Man Utd or Liverpool playing on Sunday, they would have sold every ticket, and probably more had they been available.
This, of course, should not detract from the fact that £62 for a ticket to watch a football match is way overpriced, but while there are still enough people willing to pay the price it will only increase. We Arsenal fans have paid a high price over the last seven years to see our team deliver very little in return. But despite the lack of success on the pitch, as soon as someone gave up a season ticket, another two were ready to take his place. And many former season-ticket holders still come to a few matches every year, via the silver or red membership schemes. With no real drop-off in attendance, why would the club drop the price?
Even with the very high ticket prices, Arsenal still cannot compete with Chelsea and Man City. It is hoped that the financial fair play rules will level the playing field, but I suspect City and Chelsea are already plotting ways around it. What's to stop them charging £100m a year for an executive box, or another subsidiary of their oil company sponsoring the shirts for a similar amount? In fact it's likely there will be more losers under FFP than winners. Nearly all of these will be the smaller teams like Wigan and Norwich etc. No one is going to sponsor them for £100m, and their match-day revenue won't scratch the surface of what the big clubs can earn. And what chance will the promoted teams have when they reach the promised land? At the root of all this will be the match ticket-price. If clubs want to compete, they will have to raise more money, and for most clubs the only way to do that is to get more out of the fans. With many teams having between a 25,000 and 40,000 capacity, their earning potential is limited by how much they charge to get in.
The brutal truth about teams like Man City and Chelsea is that they could afford to let everyone in for free, and not notice the loss of gate money. Man City have a 48,000 capacity, and if they charged £100 for every ticket they would make £4.8m a game. With 19 home games a season, that would earn them £91.2m. Throw in six cup games and you are up to about £120m. This massive figure would not even come close to what they have spent over the last few years. But City don't charge anything like £100 a ticket, so the figure they do earn from tickets will be considerably less, and even further away from their operating loss. The City fans who complained about the ticket cost have no right to take the moral high ground. I know they are mostly normal people, with normal jobs and incomes, but they have been supporting a club whose reckless spending has caused me, and many other football fans, to pay increasingly higher prices year on year just to stay in the game.
If clubs like City are allowed to continue unchecked, they will bring about the death of the game they are looking to dominate. It's obvious to anyone who goes to home matches that the attendances are dwindling. This may not be reflected in the official attendance figure, but the majority of no-shows are likely to be season-ticket holders, and as their ticket is already sold, they seem to be considered as being there. I expect this trend to continue until we are a successful team again. The unfortunate downside to dwindling attendances is less revenue for the club. Less revenue means, if it were possible, less money for team-building and less chance of success. And so on, until we have an average 40,000 crowd and even less chance of competing with City and Chelsea.
The only true way to level the playing field is to have transfer- and wages-caps that aren't based on income. If all teams could only spend a set amount on transfers and the wages they pay each season, they could reduce ticket prices to match the maximum expenditure. So a team with a 60,000 crowd could effectively charge half the amount of a team with a 30,000 crowd. Who knows? In an ideal world, it might even make the league competitive again.
