From Aston Villa’s astronomical ticket prices to dynamic pricing – football is coming for your wallet

It may not crop up in the news cycle quite as frequently as it did a year or two ago, but we remain in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Rent is still through the roof for most people in Britain, grocery costs continue to creep up, and energy prices are set to rise by another 10% next month. Somebody should probably tell football clubs.

Of course, Premier League teams know fine well that the average Briton can’t afford to get down to the match as often as they’d like these days. They also don’t care. The working-class fans whose support, loyalty and attendance once generated the majority of a club’s income are no longer the main market for the biggest sides. They now know that they can fill their stadiums just as easily, and much more profitably, with tourists and businesspeople on junkets.

Which explains the recent trends in ticket pricing, so neatly exemplified on Wednesday by Aston Villa, who announced absolutely astronomical ticket prices for their upcoming Champions League games, their first in Europe’s biggest competition for four decades. The very cheapest adult non-concession tickets stand at a quite incredible £70 for season ticket holders and £85 for the rest. The best seats will set an ordinary fan back £97. Such prices will be completely unaffordable for many, and the dream of top-level European football at Villa Park will either be punctured or bought into at a potentially intolerable cost.

Some have noted that the prices are around double those which Liverpool charge for Champions League group stage games at Anfield, but while some of their prices may be relatively reasonable the Reds are still one of 19 out of the 20 Premier League sides for the 2024/25 season who increased their ticket prices this summer – only Crystal Palace kept their prices steady, if £545 to £705 for an adult season ticket can be said to be steady. Tottenham Hotspur, meanwhile, announced the scrapping of seniors concessions for their season tickets back in March.

The steepling price of attending Premier League games is often described as exploiting the loyalty of the match-going fan, but it’s arguably the case that teams don’t so much wish to exploit the hardcore fan as ignore them altogether. As Kieran Maguire, an expert on football finance, recently explained on a special episode of The Guardian Football Weekly podcast, most big teams see season-ticket holders as a hindrance and would sooner do away with them entirely if they felt that they could.

Such teams know that they can sell out their seats every week without the need for regular attendees and know that occasional visitors can and will pay more. Manchester United fans know very well that obtaining tickets for games can be prohibitively expensive as they can be touted to tourists (often, lest we forget, extremely passionate fans whose love of their chosen club is quite genuine) for huge fees. Such fans are often paying for a once-in-a-lifetime experience, after all, and are willing to shell out in a way that someone living down the road in Salford may be rightly unwilling to do, even if they are able to scrape the money together.

Scrapping season tickets – just seats sold at a discount for no reason, as far as the biggest clubs are concerned – is only something that hasn’t come to pass because the uproar would be immense, and the richest teams don’t want a repeat of the protests that greeted the abortive announcement of the European Super League back in April 2021. But we still see clubs putting in measures to restrict season tickets being passed down in legacies, for instance, or creating rules which force ticket holders to give them up if they don’t attend cup games. They want season ticket holders to gradually opt out.

Clubs still fear the power of mass action by supporters to a certain degree, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t push the limits where they can, as Aston Villa, Spurs and every other established Premier League side demonstrate on a pretty regular basis. Now another evil of modern consumerism, dynamic pricing, is becoming a potential tool in the price-gouging armoury.

Also on Wednesday, the Football Supporters’ Association (FSA) released a statement condemning “voices in football” that have “started to float the idea of infecting football with dynamic pricing.” Specifically, two clubs in Spain, Valencia and Celta Vigo, are experimenting with the practice this season.

Dynamic pricing – also known as surge pricing – has been in the headlines because of its use by the band Oasis and Ticketmaster in the sale of tickets for the Gallagher brothers’ comeback tour. It saw tickets which already had an enormous face value of nearly £150 marked up to over £350 for some customers due to ‘demand’.

It’s an abhorrently greedy practice which essentially allowed the band and ticket retailer to charge exorbitant amounts for tickets to a show which customers would have felt pressured to buy immediately, knowing that a quick sell-out was assured and that they would get no second chance, while advertising the tickets at a lower initial price to get more people in the queue in the first place. In theory, should a concert struggle to sell out (or a football match have some empty seats going spare as matchday neared) the tickets would drop in price accordingly, but the only artists or clubs incentivised to opt in to such a system are those who know that they will be able to gouge some extra cash out of their fans.

“Never underestimate the potential for the most greedy owners in football to try and import terrible ideas from other industries to exploit supporter loyalty,” the FSA statement continued. “Matchgoers are already mobilising against the recent wave of price rises and attacks on concessions. Any underhand increases will be met with enormous opposition.”

Dynamic pricing would surely qualify as an underhanded tactic to increase revenue at the expense of fans by most peoples’ standards, but it may not stop clubs from testing the limits of fans’ patience. After all, while numerous supporters’ groups have voiced their frustrations at increased prices at various clubs, we haven’t seen mass protests in the European Super League mould – and apparently the opposition that clubs have faced so far hasn’t been sufficient to deter 19 of the 20 Premier League teams from ratcheting their prices up a notch.

It's worth remembering that the relationship between fan and club has fundamentally changed in the modern era of the game. The ‘club’ element of top-level football has been almost entirely eroded. Season tickets provide an illusion of a form of membership, but fans have no say in the running of the club and the social aspects of such pseudo-membership are limited to the ground for a couple of hours every fortnight or so. These are not football ‘clubs’ in the way most grassroots teams are, for example.

Instead, they are entertainment companies with customers, and it’s foolish to expect anything different when the typical Premier League owner is, for instance, an American venture capitalist. Owners at top teams are now overwhelmingly in it for the money, and have no reason to give a damn about the historical rights or experience of working-class fans that don’t really make them much cash.

The capacity to organise and mobilise remains fans’ only way to push back against practices designed to gouge them, but it seems pretty clear that not enough is being done to prevent clubs from going ahead with the more ‘ground level’ price rise methods already in play.

One wonders whether dynamic pricing would spur supporters into action sufficiently widespread and noisy that it would make clubs think twice – or whether Aston Villa fans will kick up enough of a stink to make their club reconsider their colossal Champions League ticket prices. Perhaps the fuss caused by Oasis’ decision to gouge their fans for hundreds of pounds a head will render the introduction of dynamic pricing too great of a PR risk for the Premier League, at least for the near future. If so, at least some good might have come from that particular debacle.

A battleline has to be drawn somewhere by the fans, a line past which they tell clubs they can’t go without people walking away – along with their wallets – en masse. The problem is partly that, as we saw with the willingness of several established Premier League sides to join a breakaway Super League, the clubs will keep pushing until they find that line and will do everything that they can get away with up to that point. And the other half of the problem is that several clubs may well bank on being able to fill those seats anyway after the fans that have supported them for years have gone.