The price is right?

After Covid, it was mooted that football might possibly have been served a dose of reality. The transfers of multiple players this summer serve as a stark reminder that football is still firmly in fantasy land. Haaland (who is, after all just a shit Gary Madine) is the big galumphing tip of a very big, expensive iceberg of transfers.

I don't know if you've noticed, but it's not just footballers who are getting more pricy. Even Aldi doesn't seem quite as good value as it was these days. Money is quite topical. It's a grubby thing for sure, but try doing the weekly shop without it. Foraging is great if you are a trust funded Guardian columnist with a book on 'getting away from it all' to flog but for the rest of us, living off petrol tainted blackberries and bracken soup isn't really an option cos we're too busy spending our wages getting to work to earn the wages to get to work to spend our time gathering and making organic broth. 

In recent weeks I've read about price rises at many clubs (including my own), the ludicrous prices for premium fixtures in the Premier League, such as Fulham's £100 tickets (which are, astonishingly probably aimed at tourists as opposed to Fulham fans) and debated the fact that many clubs have ignored Reading's reciprocal pricing offer in the Championship. It's heartwarming that football clubs are responding to the tightened financial circumstance assailing their supporters by raising the bar for entry.

What strikes me as odd, in all of these cases, is the number of supporters I've seen online who seem to actively want to pay higher prices. The argument generally goes something like this:

- if we want to compete, we need to back the club

This is essentially true in that ticket revenue is a significant income stream, but of course, the higher a team climb in the pyramid, the less true that becomes. The better a team is doing, the less the supporters in the ground actually matter to the club. Roughly half (in some cases more) the income of a lower league club comes from matchday revenue whereas for a top flight side, it's more like 10% of revenue.

Fans also say things like

- Well, it's £20 to watch non-league down the road so £48 with a £17 one off sign up fee to entitle you to buy tickets in the first place is a bargain when you think about it...

Again, we're ignoring the fact that as we get to the top, football clubs get greater and greater subsidy. There's something odd about the way that as more money comes into these clubs from TV, the last thing on the minds of many directors is protecting the ticket prices for supporters who previously kept the clubs afloat when there was little or no TV money. 

It's as if the clubs can't conceptualise that they might not always be at that level - that they might once again rely on the revenue through the turnstiles and it's unlikely that whatever new money they're aiming at with tourist tickets and corporate pricing is going to be flocking to watch a club grubbing around the lower reaches of the pyramid.

- it's just business - supply and demand dictates cost.

Again, yes, this is, of course, on a surface level at least, true, but as this blog has written about at length previously, football doesn't actually resemble a business in any conventional sense.

Football as a whole seems to do absolutely nothing to manage the costs it passes on to its consumers. Imagine supermarkets celebrating that they've struck eye wateringly expensive deals with milk suppliers. Building companies don't fall over each other to pay more for their materials and then triumphantly wave their overspending around and call it ambition do they?

I've no desire to see football run as a pure business. In my mind, it is first and foremost a sport and it is ceding control to business thinking that has left us with a lopsided, distorted and ultimately damaged model of competition where the sport is now secondary to the TV spectacle and ripping fans off and calling it 'an opportunity to display your loyalty' is the order of the day...

We can't, however, have it both ways. It can't both call itself a business and then act as if it's not a business just as Barclays Bank can do a bit of token charity fund raising or virtue signalling but by the nature of its business, is fundamentally not a charity or a moral force, but a bank and thus tied to profit.

The point is this. Most businesses outside of the most elite brands (like say, Rolex or Ferrari) are subject to tremendous pressure from consumers to hold down their prices and get the best possible deals for their supply. Asda, Curry's, Home Bargains etc wouldn't last five minutes if they entered a war with their competitors to overspend.

Football is of course, not Asda or Curry's. I've never had an out of body experience in a branch of Dunelm Mill. I've never chanted till I'm hoarse about Office World. I wouldn't travel across the country on my day off to eat at a new Toby Carvery just to say I've been there...

When Saturday Comes....

Football is not like those things and yet, we've essentially ended up with the worst of both worlds - one in which football as a whole IS run like it is a business and therefore our clubs largely have to accept the shitty financial structures that condemn most of us to a bleak, mid table at best trophyless future of eternal mediocrity and where it also relies heavily on the fact that to fans, it ISNT a business as we have to fund the wild and desperate efforts of our clubs to compete in the face of almost impossible financial barriers. If it was 'a business' then we'd all fuck off to Aldi as Asda took the piss.

As the cost of living bites (and it really is), petrol prices rise, food costs add up, each £30 matchday ticket, each rebranding of a previously standard block into a premium seating area with 'benefits', each hidden service charge, each yearly new shirt (always three a season now as well), each ridiculously priced training top which is essentially some shite you can by from JD sports for £25 quid more than doubled in price cos there's an iron on logo on it, each piece of 'exclusive news' hidden behind a subscription paywall is akin to a slap in the face to someone. It's basically a rich lord of the manner stood at the gates of his private estate shouting "fuck off" to the commoners who paid for it wanting to walk through the grounds they paid for.

That's possibly harsh. Not all club owners are, to use a technical term, irredeemable cunts. Some are even 'alright.' A select few might even make it to 'decent.' The problem is this - individually, clubs can have good intentions but they exist in a collective structure. Individually a club can choose to set whatever prices they want but of course, the price of competition is set by the interplay of competitors. In business, that generally drives prices down, but football has become like Formula One - spending is the key to success to a greater and greater extent, so that competition has the opposite effect on pricing to what it would have in an everyday market. 

The logic of fans is simple. We want to enjoy football. We want our team to win. For some, the game is about the experience, the community, the friendships and that aspect is essential but I suspect for the vast majority of us, even if we subscribe to that, the bottom line is - we're happier when we win and more fed up when we lose. The experience is fundamentally defined by the fact it's competitive. If it wasn't, then we could just meet our mates in the park with some cheap cider and watch pigeons wandering about aimlessly for free. There's a reason why we congregate around football and that's because it's a fucking brilliant game. 

This is the rub. We want to win and so we find ourselves cheerleading price rises and urging our fellow fans to spend, spend, spend because we hope it will make us more competitive whilst at the same time celebrating the game as a binding part of a community. It's something we should reflect upon. Yeah, that extra £5 might be affordable to you, but the lad who stands next to you, or the family who sit below you might not be there next year. 

Give me a 'G.E.N.T.R.I.F.I.C.A.T.I.O.N' 

This is, of course, all driven by excessive spending at the highest levels. The top clubs have essentially become lifestyle brands akin to Rolex. Obscenely expensive products that sit in a totally different category to the things the rest of us buy. 

We're falling over ourselves to embrace this world. Our clubs are like wannabe aspirational brands and we love it. We wet ourselves over the fact that our clubs have business managers, data scientists and elite level facilities -  whilst at the same time there's a foodbank collection outside the gates of the ground. The costs of running a club rise every year. The tins pile up and football collectively doesn't give a flying fuck. Plenty of people individually care, but we've done a spectacularly bad job as a whole of managing the cost of going to games - virtually every stadium in Europe is cheaper than it is to watch a game in the UK. It's cheaper to watch the German top tier than it is to watch some of our non-league teams. 

We might have 'the best league in the world' but it's come with a literal cost and that cost has cascaded down to all of us. In a month where (happily) the woman's game is being celebrated for creating access and a new set of fans, it might be worth stopping and wondering about whether, if it's bad (and it obviously is) that people are cut out of the game because of race, gender and sexuality, isn't it also bad that people's economic circumstances preclude them from being part of the 'football family?' 

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