Since Spurs announced that the pricing for the Europa League Round of 16 home tie against Borussia Dortmund would be in their Category C pricing bracket, an interesting debate has unfurled among fans across social media.
Dortmund pricing and the bigger picture
Since Spurs announced that the pricing for the Europa League Round of 16 home tie against Borussia Dortmund would be in their Category C pricing bracket, an interesting debate has unfurled among fans across social media.
On the face of it, pricing a European match against this calibre of opposition at between £32 and £47 may not seem unreasonable. It’s Dortmund. We pay the same to watch West Bromwich Albion and Bournemouth. They could have charged more and the stadium would still be full. It’s our biggest European game for five years.
Looking at the Dortmund pricing in isolation, what’s the problem? Yet many have passionately expressed an anger and a disappointment that Spurs chose to price this match in this way. It’s not as if the club needed the extra money, let’s be clear about that.
[leftquote]Many have passionately expressed an anger and a disappointment that Spurs chose to price this match in this way[/leftquote]
Over the past two years, Spurs has won plaudits and widespread praise from all quarters for choosing to adopt an approach to Cup pricing which was both inclusive and accessible. Cup matches, traditionally harder to sell out at home as the majority fall outside of the Season Ticket package, were seen as a good opportunity to encourage those supporters who cannot afford to attend regularly to be part of the One Hotspur family. An opportunity for parents to take their kids to their first ever games at White Hart Lane without needing a second mortgage. An opportunity for those on lower incomes or in full time education to experience White Hart Lane under the floodlights on a European night. And what a success that has been. Thousands of youngsters have had their first taste of football at Spurs and thousands more have reconnected with a team they could only dream about watching live. And this was due to every seat in every stand being priced at either £20 or £25, and £5 for juniors, or free if you bought a ‘family pack’.
This approach demonstrated an understanding of the need to make football affordable for all fans and the foresight to nurture the next generation. A terrific scheme which worked superbly well.
On Thursday 25 February, I sat in my regular seat in the East Lower to watch us dismantle Fiorentina for £25. On Friday 26 February, that same seat to watch Spurs play Dortmund in the next round of the same competition had gone up by 60% to £40.
My friend took his 5 year old son to the Fiorentina match for £30 all in. Their seats will cost £80 for Dortmund.
A family of four in the East Upper paid £50 to watch the side currently third in Serie A pulled apart by Tottenham. Their seats will cost them £176 in the next round.
The most expensive adult ticket has risen by 88% and the concessionary rate of £5 has increased by almost 250% from one round to the next.
My friend won’t be taking his boy to the Dortmund match. And those families of four will be thinking hard about what else they could do with that £176. The fans on lower incomes who grabbed the opportunity to support in earlier rounds are now back to screaming at the TV and the fantastic atmosphere enthusiastically praised and shared across various platforms by Tottenham Hotspur as prime content after the Fiorentina match will be poorer for it.
Fans are a part of the English football product, let’s not forget that. Passionate, loud crowds are a marketers dream.
[fullquote]For too long now, the financial burden on fans has been too great. [/fullquote]
Football is all about supply and demand, though. It’s a matter of simple economics. It’s a business like any other. And it’s a real shame those fans are now priced out, but Category C pricing against Dortmund is still an absolute bargain, right?
Football is not a business like any other. Football trades on unbelievable, irrational levels of loyalty. I shop at Tesco’s. I don’t have a Tesco’s tattoo on my left shoulder. I also occasionally pop into Sainsbury’s if it’s easier. If Tesco increase the price of their custard creams, I can simply go elsewhere. If they discontinue a product line, it doesn’t ruin my entire weekend. I don’t lose sleep if they change the formation of their aisles. I’m not a stakeholder in Tesco’s. My shopping there does not increase the worth of their brand.
Football is incomparable to any other business. And supply and demand and the free market economy is too simplistic an argument in this context.
For too long now, the financial burden on fans has been too great. And there was a real chance here to continue the goodwill generated by Cup pricing at Spurs this season by electing to continue with a pricing approach that was both popular and mutually beneficial.
It’s not as if Tottenham Hotspur need the additional gate receipts this pricing decision will generate. The latest TV broadcast deal is worth £8.3 billion. Let that sink in for a moment. The total ticket income from all Premier League home games at White Hart Lane was c £35 million last season, and that includes corporate hospitality. Ticket revenues are dwarfed by broadcast and sponsorship deals. Every fan could watch every game for free and the clubs would still have more money than this year, such is the increase in the 2016-2019 TV deal.
But watching Dortmund for the same price as Bournemouth is still very reasonable, yes? The minute anyone takes the most expensive league in the world as a benchmark for ticket pricing, we’re all in trouble. Premier League tickets are too expensive. They have risen by 700% since the inception of the elite division. Commentators, journalists, pundits, players, national fan organisations, the Premier League and, to an extent, the Chairmen themselves acknowledge this. Two wrongs do not make a right. It may be the same price as watching Bournemouth but that price is too high to start with.
Fans are so conditioned to paying through the nose that some are now at the stage where they argue we should actually thank clubs for only partially milking us, not milking us completely dry.
Still, it’s only £40. What can you do in London for £40 these days? I’m going to a gig next month and my ticket is far more than that. It’s still reasonable. I’m not, however, going to 20 or 30 or 40 gigs in a 9 month spell, where I’ll be mainly sitting in the freezing cold on a plastic seat, sipping at a pitifully weak cup of tea after queuing for 20 minutes to be served by a bewildered member of the match day catering staff. Football is not a leisure pursuit like any other, either.
But £40 against Dortmund does feel about right, doesn’t it? That depends on your benchmark. It’s subjective. What feels right to one fan will depend on their circumstances and the context of the wider pricing policy in English football, which many feel is artificially high. Would the tie be any less attractive or any less important if tickets were priced at, say £30 all areas and £5 for children? We would still be playing the same opposition in the same stage of the same competition. The accepted norm that prices increase as competitions progress and opposition improves has traction, but it’s the level of increase up for debate here. Tottenham have discarded an approach that worked in favour of a quick buck, and an unnecessary one at that. And norms are there to be challenged.
[rightquote]Football is incomparable to any other business. And supply and demand and the free market economy is too simplistic an argument in this context.[/rightquote]
Yet White Hart Lane will be packed to the rafters on 17 March. For every fan now relegated to their sofa, dozens wait to eagerly take their places. And that’s our fault. With every passing opportunity to make a stand and speak out in solidarity with others less fortunate than ourselves, we encourage clubs to exploit our loyalty, our passion and our bank balances. Because this is not just about the Dortmund pricing. It’s about setting a precedent for all subsequent rounds from here on in. A quarter final won’t drop in price, a semi final will undoubtedly be Category A. A line has been drawn in the sand.
In just over two years, Spurs move into their new 61,000 seater stadium. Those fans who turned up for the group stage games will be needed once again and more regularly if our new home is to even come close to replicating the feel of White Hart Lane. Whether they’ll get through the turnstiles is dependent on Spurs adopting the kind of approach they’ve discarded with the Dortmund pricing.
Spurs are yet to announce their pricing for next season and are currently exploring pricing structures for the new ground. We’ve been cash cows for too long. Don’t let us all be crying over spilt milk over the coming years.
All views and opinions expressed in this article are the views and opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of The Fighting Cock. We offer a platform for fans to commit their views to text and voice their thoughts. Football is a passionate game and as long as the views stay within the parameters of what is acceptable, we encourage people to write, get involved and share their thoughts on the mighty Tottenham Hotspur.
8 Comments
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27/02/2016 @ 3:49 pm
Is definitely an opportunity missed. Ironic that its against a team from a league where pricing is a definite reason for attendances and atmosphere. Club may rue decisions like this when we playing midweek cup games in new stadium.
We may laugh at wham and their prices of ST at Stratford but bums will be on seats.
27/02/2016 @ 6:37 pm
This whole “football is different” argument is a nonsense. I was a season ticket holder for 15+ years. My circumstances changed. My visits to WHL changed. No football club is going to adopt socialist tendencies of accommodation for those worse off. It’s not the way it works and it hasn’t worked that way for over 20 years. There have been plenty of opportunities in he past (more timely ones) to make a stand. We chose not too as a fan base and as a football community and now we are focusing on the wrong event in which to rock the boat imho. The horse has bolted. Football has moved on. Half and half scarves will tell you that the game is as much about tourists as it is about loyalty. I do have a Spurs tattoo on my arm. But I have dealt with the reality of our market and for every TV subscription that we have for football it only fuels that reality. I don’t think that taking the club to task over this particular decision is going to change anything. And Katrina as part of the THST should be raising these issues at the appropriate forum that has been given to them by the club to act as our voice. Change may eventually come. But it won’t come over Europa League pricing. The culprit here is what the premier league and moreover the champions league have done to our game. And we have been absorbing the poison for that long that our immune system has absorbed it. Kill the Premier League behemoth and you have a chance.
27/02/2016 @ 8:28 pm
Believe me, the issue of ticket pricing as a whole is and continues to be raised around the board room table at THFC, at meetings with the FSF, the Premier League itself and at the England and Wales Football Council I also sit on.
It’s an absolutely fundamental concern throughout the entire supporter movement.
This is not about the pricing of one game. It’s how that has a knock on effect for subsequent cup matches and this shouldn’t be seen in isolation.
Sometimes it’s important to express your opinion as an individual rather than as part of a collective and I’m thankful to TFC for enabling me to do so via their platform.
THST also issued a statement on pricing today, which sits on our own website as a formal position.
For me, it’s important as many fans as possible understand the issue here and if choosing a platform alternative to our own to widen that message helps, then I’m very happy with that.
Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts – that’s what I’m looking for.
27/02/2016 @ 7:40 pm
“It’s not as if the club needed the extra money, let’s be clear about that.”
100% wrong. Every club today needs money, and lots of it. A team like Spurs, who want to be one of the big boys but still have revenue that pale in comparison to the real financial elites especially need it. This is true all the time, but all the more so when we have a massive development project to pay off.
Also, using the TV deal as an example (of why a team doesn’t need money) is ridiculous. That money is shared by all teams (not evenly I know), so all this does is raise the need to get even MORE money, to further separate yourself from the pack. In a market of limited supply of talent and huge demand (now expanded dramatically by every PL team having tons of TV money), all that has happened is the price of goods has ben raised.
Further, to a point made in the post, Spurs (like all teams) know they have you by the balls. They are not your typical product A vs product B where price (and quality) mainly drives your purchasing decision. They know they can put out whatever product they want and you are going to lap it up. Even better (for them), they know that they can raise prices regardless of quality and enough people will still pay for it. Setting up the next-generation of fans is irrelevant in this kind of market.
Any discussion where Spurs are treated like a football club and not a global for-profit company needs to just stop. Those days are long, LONG gone. The organization is a multi-million dollar company where the only people analyzing financial decisions of the team should be people who work in business or finance.
YES this sucks, but yes this is the reality of it.
27/02/2016 @ 7:45 pm
I’m sympathetic to a lot of what’s said here, but I think focusing on the prices of the most expensive tickets is slightly misleading when the families you mentioned could just get cheaper seats. A family of four could sit in the North Lower for £98. Sure, the view isn’t quite as good as the East Upper (though no pillars!), but I think it helps to look at the price someone might realistically pay.
That still might be too much for some and I think there’s something to be said for making it affordable for a whole competition all the way through so fans with lower incomes can feel part of it a bit more. But, the simple fact is that although we have a load of TV money, so does every other club in the league so it doesn’t help us compete. We’re trying to build a new stadium (currently with cash reserves because the financing isn’t in place) and the extra £500k from this pricing (when they could easily, easily raise way more) goes straight back into the club. People say “it’s all about supply and demand now”, but it isn’t. They could charge Cat A prices and still sell it out, they don’t because they’re trying to accommodate as many fans as possible.
The ultimate choice is this… would you be prepared for Spurs to forego revenue that helps the team stay competitive in the long run to keep prices even further below the market rate than they already are? Some say yes, some say no… but we can’t pretend there isn’t a choice.
01/03/2016 @ 1:31 pm
I couldn’t agree more that fans will pay over the odds to see our team play; we are not simply consumers. And the ticket prices are, of course, only a part of the expense of the day. Living in the wilds of Suffolk means a round trip of over 100 miles. (The two who sit next to me travel from Wellingborough!) But throughout February and March, my trip means a drive to the station, train to Ingatestone, rail replacement bus to Newbury Park, tube to Stratford, and then train to Northumberland Park. On Sunday, that meant 12 hours out. A rail season ticket saves some money, but the season’s travel to home games still amounts to over £400. Moan about it? Yes, of course I will. But not go? Don’t be silly!
01/03/2016 @ 2:54 pm
Agree absolutely with all Kat says, and am right behind THST in campaigning for a pricing policy that makes it possible for our younger supporters to get to see their team. If YOU agree with us, get behind THST! For £10 a year you can join the Trust on-line, and increase its leverage with the club. We already have 11,000 supporters signed up and that makes the Trust a very credible supporters’ voice. Go to http://www.thstofficial.com
COYS!!!
02/03/2016 @ 8:55 pm
For the record, I am a member of THST. I am an admirer of the fine work they do. However, the THST is becoming predictable. If we weren’t building a new stadium, ticket prices would essentially be all they talk about.
The supply and demand argument is absolutely right. If you don’t want to pay Category C prices (or more), or can’t, then the fact is that someone else will. The club have previously commented that the idea of reducing ticket prices in view of the new TV deal is not a bad idea in itself but why should Spurs do it and the other 19 PL clubs not? Why put ourselves at a competitive disadvantage?
I would love to live in Kensington and drive a Ferrari, but I can’t afford to. So I don’t. The sad fact is that if you can’t afford to go to White Hart Lane, or the new [Naming Rights] Stadium, then it’s just tough. Despite the admirable work of the THST and others, ticket prices are only going one way. At the moment, I can afford to give Spurs all the support I can as a Bronze Member but if and when the sad day comes when I can no longer afford to, then that’s life. Until that day, and beyond, I will give my club all the support I possibly can.
As Warren Buffett observed: “Price is what you pay – value is what you get”. Maybe the THST need to focus more on value than price in their discussions with the club. But at the moment, second in the PL (with first place and / or Champions League pending) and flagship fixtures like Dortmund coming, value feels pretty decent at the moment. COYS.