At what point do fans start give up on Premier League football in droves?
There has to come a breaking point over Premier League ticket prices, but where is it? And how high might it be?
You can almost imagine the beads of sweat forming on their foreheads as the realisation hit them. A dribble of saliva forming in the corner of their mouths, as the realisation of the possibilities started to sink in. All they have to do is be brazen enough.
Sure, there’d be an outcry, but there’d been outcries before and both crowds and ticket prices had continued to rise. It’s the purest form of capitalism, one in which the market determines the price of a service in real time; subject to a—ahem—minimum level. All they have to do is be brazen enough. This doesn’t feel like a particularly outlandish vision of how the idea of dynamic pricing landed as a potential concept in the Premier League.
This subject landed in the public consciousness just last weekend with the chaotic scenes as Oasis tickets went on sale for their brief reunion next summer. As hundreds of thousands joined the queue the website crashed, people were booted, and prices leapt by hundreds of pounds as demand for the tickets sent whatever algorithm was being used to determine them something approaching haywire. And then, a few days later, after feverish talk about the ethics of such ticketing systems both on social media and in the press, they announced a couple of extra dates anyway.
The Football Supporters Association have already growled in the direction of Premier League clubs, warning them to not go doing anything daft. We all know who the owners of these clubs are. We already know that if they think they can get away with it, they will. Hell, their predecessors were brazen enough to break away and take all the money with them in the first place, and that was more than thirty years ago, now.
At present, it is understood that only the Spanish clubs Valencia and Celta Vigo are actively using dynamic pricing, but the pushing of the practice into the mainstream as a result of last weekend’s bin fire of a ticket sale has brought the matter up for discussion. There are, it is understood, no current plans to introduce dynamic pricing to the Premier League.
But none of this is to say that price gouging isn’t already taking place. After an absence of more than four decades, it might have been expected that Aston Villa’s return to the premier event of European football—they last qualified for it so long ago that it was still called the European Cup rather than the Champions League—should have been a cause of celebration.
With all those extra matches as a result of UEFA’s byzantine ‘Swiss Model’ to replace the group stages (which has increased the number of matches at this stage from 125 to 189, a leap of just over 50%), the club would get rich, while the fans would get to see some of Europe’s best turning out at Villa Park for the first time since Juventus in 1983. Bayern Munich at home! How exciting! Everyone’s a winner!
And then the prices for these matches were published. A cheapest standard ticket price of £85, including the wheelchair bays. A cheapest ticket for those over 66 and between 18 & 21 of £75, and £30 for those under 18. The cheapest ticket for season ticket holders—because, of course, your season ticket doesn’t include cups matches—was set at £70. That sound you can hear in the background is 42,000-odd claret and blue balloons deflating at the same time.
It feels repetitive to have to talk about out of control rent prices, inflation which sure still feels higher than the official figures given, winter coming and rising fuel prices, and so on, ad nauseum. We’ve all been here before. And this is what happens when vulture capitalism arrives in sport. Prices go up because they know we’re desperate enough, and that it doesn’t really matter whether we’re complaining or not so long as we pay the hell up because there will always be a queue behind them. This is business. Ethics are for losers.
But this does all make you wonder… is there really no limit to what Premier League supporters will pay out to watch their teams? Are there really still 42,000-odd people who‘ll pay almost £100 for the pleasure of a game between Aston Villa and Bayern Munich which is of no immediate real consequence because of the very nature of the system which is chucking in all these extra matches in the first place.
I mean Jesus, they’re barely even knocking anybody out as a result of these 189 matches. Only eleven of the 36 clubs involved will be out, by the end of it. Those that finish in first to eighth will automatically go on to the Round of 16, while those that finish in ninth to 24th places will enter a two-legged play-off to join them.
It kinda feels a little as though no-one has given much consideration to several factors, here. Firstly, has it not been completely evident to anyone in a position to do anything about it that players are, thanks to more games and a vast increase in the tempo of games themselves in recent years, burning out quicker? Do they have no idea whatsoever of how downright boring this is going to get? 189 matches is only one short of half the number in an entire Premier League season. And that’s this stage only. Add in those play-offs and you go sailing past 50%.
So, where is the goddam line, here? If Aston Villa are comfortable with charging £85 this season, why shouldn’t it be £100 in a year or two’s time or £500 in five if the market can sustain it? Fans need to stop loving their clubs so blindly and give some consideration to the fact that they’re being turned upside down and shaken until every last penny falls out of their pockets every time these tickets go on sale.
It is to be presumed that, for all that guff about ‘the people’s game’ that they still churn out, elite level football is nothing like that any more. Only a certain number of people are invited in person to this particular party now, and that doesn’t include millions who aren’t financially comfortable to pay ever-escalating cost. A proportion of them will have the money for cable TV. Others may stream. Others still have walked away from the Premier League and strayed down in the direction of the increased affordability of the non-league game.
But the non-league game has changed in many ways as well. Tickets do have to often be bought in advance, and registration can mean signing yourself up from regular emails from a club in which you only had a passing interest over in perpetuity. Contactless payment at turnstiles and around grounds have been highly convenient, though I have more than once been frogmarched from a turnstile to a bar because the club concerned only had one contactless machine.
The advent of modern technology hasn’t uniformly improved our experience, and it’s offered fresh ways to exploit fans. There have already been angry statements. There will probably be many more angry flags. But the fact remains that while someone will pay those prices, those prices will remain, and they will likely leap further in the future. But that’s business. All they have to do is be brazen enough.