We all know that with the inflation of wages and transfer fees over the last decade the costs of running football clubs has shot through the roof. What was an industry that was barely economically sustainable to begin with is now getting out of hand, but is it fair to transfer those costs on to the pocket of fans. This year my season ticket cost me £1,500 for Arsenal, and I know that some people at the club are paying a lot more too. That works out to just over £62 per game. To say that it is overpriced would be an understatement. High prices are not just confined to the top tier of English football. A friend of mine that supports Ipswich said that when he went to watch Ipswich against Reading earlier in the season he had to pay £32 and a friend who is a Charlton fan says he regularly pays over £20 to watch his team in League One.
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Clearly fans want their team to succeed and as long as fans can scrape the money together for tickets they will make the necessary sacrifices and do so. However there will come a time when we simply become disillusioned with the outrageous prices we are being forced to pay. Arsenal’s final game of the season last year was met with chanting of “6%, you’re having a laugh” in reference to the rise of ticket prices by 6.5% from last year to now. And it is a fair point.
Ivan Gazidis, the Arsenal chief executive, stated that one of the reasons for this was that the cost of running the stadium had doubled in the last five years, a fact that will be true for almost every stadium with the increase in gas and electricity prices. However the same problems affect the lives of fans too and so is it really fair to pass these increases on to us?
We all want our teams to sign good players, and to keep the good players we have by offering them hefty contracts, but how willing are we to continue footing the bill. For fans that don’t attend games it is easy to say that your club should be spending more than they are, that they should try and sign the best possible players. But the reality is that money doesn’t appear from thin air. It appears out of the wallets of the fans.
Whilst some foreign owners understand that when they purchase a football club, some of their own money must be given to the cause, others do not. Some treat their new club merely as a way to make more money for themselves, something that both Mike Ashley and the Glazers have been accused of. A fan’s love for the club is about as close to unconditional love as you are likely to find outside of parent/child relationships and so for owners and directors of clubs to abuse this by milking the fans for every last penny is grossly immoral. Not only that but there will also come a time when the fans either cannot continue to pay the ever-rising costs, or they simply won’t want to. Especially when you consider the recent court case regarding whether or not people in England should be able to buy cheap foreign sports channels to watch the football. Even the cost of buying Sky so you can watch the football pales in comparison to current and future ticket prices.
Everyone understands that clubs need money, as does almost everyone else in the world, but the way to do it is not necessarily to raise prices in and around the stadiums. For example I would be far more willing to eat the food and have a few pints in The Emirates before a game if they weren’t so expensive. If a pint cost the same as it does in the pub more people would be willing to drink in stadiums as opposed to avoiding them until just before kick-off. Lowering prices might mean smaller profit margins for clubs but they may make more money as they could attract more of the fans to the stadium before three o’clock.
Follow me on Twitter @H_Mackay
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