As the season draws to a close, and the cost of living crisis continues to bite, football fans will be thinking about the expense of attending regular matches. In Germany, Fortuna Düsseldorf last week said they would offer free tickets to supporters, but how are English clubs responding to financial pressures on their fanbase?
According to the Office for National Statistics, 38% of adults are spending more on everyday items. For match-goers, ticket prices are often proving an expense too far.
Fulham’s season-ticket prices for the 2023-24 season, for example, are causing their fans some concern. An adult seat in the new Riverside Stand costs anywhere from £1,250-£3,000, with prices increasing in the rest of the stadium by 18%. The rise comes after financial accounts showed Fulham’s owner, Shahid Khan, lent the club £116.5m by issuing new shares after the Premier League outfit made a loss of £58m last season.
Ian Clarke, the vice-chair of the Fulham supporter’s trust, says the blanket increase in the other stands is causing the biggest consternation. “Not every Fulham fan lives locally with a nice apartment overlooking the river. Fans have been coming for generations. Our catchment area spreads down the M3, all the way to Surrey,” says Clarke, who has been supporting Fulham for 50 years.
“There’s room for all, the Riverside Stand provides some fantastic opportunities to sell high-priced hospitality experiences and bring the revenue in, we just need them to remember that the grassroots fans aren’t necessarily the ones with the extra cash.
“We want the club to be sustainable. We don’t want the ground to be full of short-term visitors, who can afford to pay, but won’t stick around with the club.”
Elsewhere, clubs with an uncertain future are hesitant to raise prices. Wolves have yet to secure their Premier League place, which may explain the club’s reticence about announcing new season-ticket prices.
Wolves Trust 1877 surveyed the club’s supporters, with almost 1,000 responses. They showed match-goers are overwhelmingly (86.9%) against a season-ticket price increase for next season. Fosun has owned Wolves since 2016 and ticket prices have increased every season apart from the Covid-disrupted 2020‑21 season. Leicester have frozen the price of next season’s tickets.
Local conditions are also an important factor. Wolverhampton’s biggest employer, the Goodyear tyre factory, closed in 2015. Since then, the area has continued to be one of the most deprived in the UK in terms of child poverty and has struggled to adapt to the loss of manufacturing. Season-ticket holder Neil Dady says matches have now become “less of a family event”. Dady, who is a trust member of the Football Supporters’ Association’s council, believes the club should heed its “one pack” mentality and freeze prices to prevent “tipping devoted fans into poverty”.
Daniel Warren, chairman of the trust, believes “fans are not immune” to the conditions in the city. “There are people being pushed into an affordability crisis in terms of being able to watch matches. Anecdotally, and in our survey, people say they will be priced out – these are fans that have been going for 20-25 years,” he says. “It’s eat or heat for many residents, food and warm bank usage is at an all-time high. I worry for the fans that live within a mile of the Molineux.”
Some supporters are leaving big football for ever. The new age of corporate money in the game has brought a growing gap between clubs and supporters, with some turning to local or non-league clubs.
Sam Ord is a trustee of Old Spotted Dog ground, which was taken over by a member-owned non-league side, Clapton Community FC, in 2020. He had supported Norwich but has been a Clapton fan since before the pandemic. “I used to live in Newham in the West Ham area; poverty there has skyrocketed,” he says, speaking in a personal capacity. “It’s always been high. So now for a community club to be like: ‘You can come to our games, you don’t have to pay, it doesn’t matter about your visa status. It doesn’t matter about sexuality, gender, whatever you are welcome here, and we will help you, we will support you and you can support us too.’ It’s a big community effort.”
This trend of shifting allegiance to local teams is growing. Scarborough Athletic were formed in 2007 as a phoenix club by the Seadog Trust, after Scarborough FC were liquidated. The member-owned club play in National League North.
Bryan Humphries, a longstanding Tottenham fan, has found himself supporting the new team after moving to a retirement home in Scarborough, having previously played at semi-professional level for nearby Bridlington Town. Humphries had been making the 400-mile round trip to north London as a season-ticket holder, but he now prefers to stay local after realising Spurs offered no reductions for pensioners. He started following Scarborough Athletic.
“It is a reawakening of my love for football,” says Humphries, who is 68 and gave up his ticket at Spurs. “The bigger clubs need to look after pensioners. Scarborough Athletic is a fantastic club, Jonathan Greening [the manager] is a former Premier League player, but he goes around to every table and asks how people are doing. The players give everything. It is close-knit.”
For the match-going fan, community matters, but supporters wait with some trepidation to see whether English football’s elite will respond sympathetically to tough financial times.
