Changing the conversation on ticket pricing
One of the stories of this season has been the growing revolt from fans over pricing policy. So what does it mean and where do we go now?
In less than 12 months, football fans around the country have changed a conversation on ticket pricing that had been going on for years. Actions throughout the Premier League have not only seen clubs targeted but supporter groups stand side by side under the banner of #stopexploitingloyalty, a campaign launched by the FSA in response to growing anger over pricing. The campaign has pulled in a new generation of supporters, breathed new life into some organisations, and gained a foothold in the mainstream media.
It’s worth taking a moment to consider what has been achieved. While there’s been disquiet over the rising price of going to the game for years, a subject Nick Harris and I covered in depth last year in a series of articles on The Real Face of Premier League Price Inflation, attempts to do anything about it were brushed aside. It was said it was fans’ own fault for ‘exploiting themselves’ by continuing to buy tickets, that only a mass boycott would change anything, that the prices weren’t that high when compared with sport in the US, that the game would never agree to restrict home ticket pricing as it did when the Premier League agreed to cap away ticket prices at £30 in 2016/17.
Those arguments are being exposed. Fetishising boycotts or blaming fans for supporting their team was never sustainable. Comparing the price of tickets to one-off events or sports in other countries ignored the issues of culture, community and loyalty that help create the atmosphere at English grounds so valued by TV companies. Saying that the game would never agree to price controls ignored the fact that action and the weight of opinion can change the boundaries of the possible.
I wrote briefly about the campaign in December, but I wanted to return in a bit more depth as we are reaching one of the turning points every campaign does.
One of the things that has stood out is the imagination and variety of tactics deployed. This video produced by the Hammers United group at West Ham is a great example, and that chant in the background still has me chuckling.
West Ham fans have staged one of the longest-running campaigns since their club decided to attack concessionary pricing, with Save Our Seniors at Spurs also making their voices heard. Fans at Leicester, Ipswich, Aston Villa, Manchester City, Manchester United, Fulham and Nottingham Forest and elsewhere have also protested. Wolves agreed to reverse plans to increase season ticket prices after fan protests, Brentford announced a price freeze for next season, with the club’s chairman backing the principles of #stopexploitingloyalty, and this week Liverpool announced the club would not be increasing prices for next season.
The club’s statement mentioned “meaningful engagement with its official Supporters Board” as contributing to its decisions, and referenced “the ambition to make ticket access a realistic goal for all supporters”. Fan group the Spirit of Shankly said it had “made it clear that any increase would negatively impact loyal supporters and undermine the traditions and culture of our club.” SOS has played a leading part in the national campaign, and in keeping the wider threat to our game’s culture prominent in discussions.
The Stop Exploiting Loyalty hashtag has proved to be a smart one. It’s turned the finger pointing away from the supposedly stupid fans who ‘allow’ ourselves to be exploited to the clubs which venerate market economics on the one hand while knowingly exploiting the unique customer loyalty of their unique businesses on the other. And it brings in the fact that this exploited audience helps create the atmosphere around the product that the TV companies pay for in order for the money to come rolling in. When the last TV deal was announced, FSA research found that every Premier League club could let every fan in to every game for free and still earn more money than in the previous year. But still the prices went up.
There have been successes, but the campaign as a whole still cannot be called a success. There are rumours that some clubs are planning increases of up to 5% next year. Brighton & Hove Albion have already announced that level of increase on season tickets, together with an attack on concessionary pricing that directly penalises many of those same fans who put their hands in their pockets when the club nearly went out of business not that many years ago. Not so much exploiting loyalty as shoving it in their fans’ faces. And Brighton were seen as one of the good guys. There’s a long way to go.
A way to go too for fan groups. The movement has been re-energised, new faces are emerging, new groups forming, and new alliances formed. And as always happens when campaigns develop, new questions are being asked. Are the old ways of organising appropriate, or effective? Have demands been too narrow or too wide?
It’s been important that the economic arguments of the campaign have been rooted in the wider issues about access to tickets, what kind of audience is being attracted, the importance of community and traditional ties of loyalty – in short, about the culture that makes our game what it is. The energy behind the campaign derives in part from a more general frustration at the direction in which the game is going. Here there is both danger and opportunity. The danger is that calls to ‘preserve culture’ become solely backward-looking, conjuring up a rose-tinted golden age; the opportunity is that this strand of campaigning enables us to go wider and deeper. But it is important to retain the focus on pricing, and the campaign could also do with producing more hard research to challenge the economic arguments put forward by its opponents. Drawing deeper on the structures and experiences in countries such as Germany and Sweden will also be beneficial.
One key question is about the role of work inside and outside the room. It’s one that will be familiar to anyone who has been involved in political or campaigning work. The fact is that work has to be done in both arenas, and it has to be linked. Too often those outside the room lapse into oppositionism without acknowledging that in order to succeed a dialogue has to be established and relationships built. But those inside the room can also too often forget that, while every discussion can’t be conducted in public, it is important to keep your mass base informed and yourself accountable.
Being in the room is something we have fought for over many years and it has not been achieved easily. That achievement should not be tossed aside. Equally, the achievement needs to be cherished and built upon, not used as a reason not to challenge, or simply to justify being in the room for its own sake. I worry from some of the discussions I hear that this link is too easily forgotten. The win at Liverpool shows what can be achieved when the balance is right.
Perhaps the most encouraging change in conversation is that it is no longer about why fans in England are not challenging the direction the game is going in, but about how best to do that.
Some very interesting developments in the ongoing Governance Bill saga, covered regularly in The Football Fan. Manchester City’s victory in the associated party transactions case surely seals the case for independent regulation. The Premier League’s rules have once again been found wanting, and the verdict is pretty damning. Boiled down, it seems what did for the Premier League was the decision to exclude shareholder loans from the scope of rules on APT transactions when other deals which had exactly the same impact were included. And the fact that some of the clubs who pushed for shareholder loans to be excluded were among the most significant beneficiaries of shareholder loans will not have gone unnoticed by m’learned friends.
It seems, amazingly, that if you let the members of a competition decide on the rules they must follow, they will try to set rules that most benefit them. It’s a pretty succinct argument for an independent regulator.
Incredibly, the latest expose of the utter shambles that is the Premier League’s attempt to regulate itself has resulted in the PL calling for, wait for it, more powers for the new regulator. That’s the regulator it has spent months arguing will have too much power – after spending even longer arguing it was never going to happen.
The City case ruling came at a particularly embarrassing time for PL head of policy Clare Sumner and Brighton CEO Paul Barber. They both appeared on a Price of Football podcast to argue why they agreed with a regulator unless it was allowed to do anything significant, in which case it was a terrible idea. Sumner delivered some significant corporate word salad and the opinion that PL rules were carefully calibrated, while Barber spent a lot of time complaining how outrageous it was that not only had Brighton not been asked to contribute but had not been used as the sole research basis for the whole review.
There was much made of the fact that the regulator would cost £10m a year – something that would have to come from clubs – but this appears a bargain alongside the £50m in legal bills alone racked up last year by the PL, and the expected costs of tens of millions in the APT case.
Barber’s appearance surely brought his stint as the latest acceptable face the Premier League wheels out to an end. (Stocks are now very short). Sources with extensive knowledge of the review process say they have no knowledge of Brighton attempting to contact the Review to give evidence. If Brighton did contact someone, it would be interesting to know who. But anyone could submit written evidence and many (including other PL clubs) did.
Perhaps noses were put out of joint because the Review panel did approach Brentford as an example of a recently promoted club. Brighton and Brentford’s boardrooms enjoy what is called in the trade ‘frosty relations’ after a falling out between the owners. Or perhaps Brighton’s post is handled by the same people who carefully calibrate PL rules.
If, as it appears, Brighton’s didn’t approach the review, could it have had something to do with the fact that the PL was busy telling all its members that the regulator would never happen?
But hold on, who is this setting out how much the Premier League has been engaged in “an enormous amount of consultation” on the Review? And again here? Why, it is Richard Masters, chief executive of the Premier League, an organisation in which Barber’s club holds a 5% share. And an organisation which had as a member of its fan-led review advisory group, which had extra meetings on the subject with the last government, [checks notes] Brighton’s Paul Barber.
It really is, as they used to say on the telly, a funny old game. All of this has proved quite a test for Martin Samuel, who has put in a Stakhanovite effort producing articles saying what a terrible idea the regulator is, and also on what a terrible shambles the Premier League’s efforts to run itself are. He seems unable, however, to take the small next step to recognising the connection between the terrible shambles and the need for an independent regulator.
Here’s a thought. If a regulator which costs £10m a year will, as some clubs have claimed, force it to put ticket prices up, will one that can be conservatively estimated to save in the region of £70m a year in legal fees enable it to put them them down? Answers on a postcard to what Brian Glanville dubbed The Greed Is Good League way back in 1992.
One of the things that really used to wind me up when I was more formally active was overly restrictive bag policies. The subject came up again this week with news of Fulham’s attempt to ban all bags from the Putney Stand for the game against Crystal Palace. Apparently some Palace fans, who share the stand with the home support, had brought flares in last year so it was bye-bye bags.
Now, before I go on I should say that we always recognised the security issues at play, largely – and this did come as news to some of the safety officials we dealt with – because we didn’t want to be blown up. But there are questions of proportion and discrimination. Banning bags entirely is a considerable inconvenience for fans who have to travel long distances and need to carry, at the least, keys, money, phone and phone charger (in these days of digital tickets). But particularly women.
That’s because of a number of reasons. Women’s clothes traditionally have fewer pockets – social history fans can read more on this in a fascinating article from the sumptuously-named Pudding Cool – and many, if not all women, tend to have more to carry. The whole issue has produced some extraordinary arguments.
I’ve been in meetings where female fan reps have had to explain to all-male panels why women need to carry sanitary products. And I’ve been accused of being a sexist for arguing that some women want to take a small can of hairspray, a hairbrush, mirror and some make-up with them in a handbag. Apparently this meant I assumed ‘they are all dolly birds’. In an industry that bangs on about diversity and inclusion so much, the lack of understanding that THERE ARE DIFFERENT KINDS OF WOMEN is astounding.
The arbitrary nature of rules was exposed when Spurs were in residence at Wembley and we met safety officials there. They at first insisted that no bags bigger than A5 were allowed. We went away and gathered some actual research which proved there was no greater threat from explosives in an A4 bag than an A5, and that the threat from both was extremely low. The policy got reversed. As did the ban on umbrellas which, you’ve guessed it, has a disproportionate impact on women.
Some of the safety staff used to get very annoyed at being challenged, and did on occasion try to steamroller the ‘terrorist threat’ argument over us. Asking for evidence and risk assessment was a terrible cheek, it seemed. But in the Premier League fan group network we had a secret weapon – two of our most experienced fan reps, Kat Law from Spurs and Lois Langton from Arsenal. Both were extremely determined women and Lois – one of the country’s leading family law experts – also had a very distinctive style in Goth outfits, making her hard to miss. Both liked a handbag. And neither of them took any shit.
It got to the stage where people would know what was coming even before the fan reps said anything, and our success rate in getting people to back down was pretty good. Amusing as it was, it really is quite disgraceful that we have to put forward such basic arguments in this day and age. Congratulations to the Fulham Lillies women’s group at Craven Cottage for being the latest to challenge this nonsense.
Photo: Nottingham Forest Supporters Trust
Great stuff as ever Martin.