Sorry we’re not dead yet

Tottenham Hotspur have a problem. Not enough of their longstanding fans are dying.

Forget the fact that its new stadium, widely regarded as one of the best in Europe, generates £4.8m in revenue at every game. Or that its chairman is the most handsomely remunerated in the Premier League. Or that the club is the eighth richest in Europe playing in the richest league in world football, and benefitting from the most lucrative TV deal in world football.

Because according to the Club’s announcement on Season Ticket prices for next year: “The number of senior concession Season Tickets has risen to four times the number at White Hart Lane – not taking matchday concessions into account. This increase is clearly not sustainable and will start to limit ticket choice for others year on year. We have, therefore, reluctantly taken the decision not to make new senior concession Season Tickets available, starting from Season 2025/26”. And there’s a 6% rise across all general admission season tickets.

Just take a few minutes to read and fully digest that. Fans who have supported the Club for years are living for too long. This is preventing other people from taking their place but, most importantly, it is preventing the Club from taking as much money as it would like to. It is “not sustainable”.

Setting aside the fact that this has to be a serious contender for the title of Most Morally Objectionable Decision Ever Taken By A Football Club for just a second, the argument that the low death rate among season ticket holders is creating an “unsustainable” financial situation is complete and utter baloney. The Club has all the information, including age, about season ticket holders on its database. It knows when each and every one will reach the age at which they are eligible for a concession. So it can project income, and adjust where necessary. In order to make the situation sustainable.

Football clubs are not the only businesses that have members who age. But Tottenham Hotspur Football Club appears to be the only one that has a problem with this. If anyone can tell me of any other comparable business that has a problem with its customers living too long, please let me know in the comments.

The argument is baloney because it assumes there will be no – and let’s just for a minute join the THFC board in stripping the basic humanity out of the equation – natural wastage. The fact is that a certain number of fans will, in the natural scheme of things, die over the years, therefore sparing the Club the inconvenience of having to grant them a cheaper ticket. So the nightmare scenario of the ground being packed full of senior citizens paying a fraction of what the Club considers more economically useful customers would is hardly likely to arise, even when the well-documented rise in the average age of the crowd is taken into account.

And anyway, just to recap, the Club already has income of £4.8m every match day. That’s £91.2m just for the 19 home Premier League games. Enough, you would think, to deal with a little churn in the demographic.

It’s at this stage that the type of economics genius who likes to bang on about the government maxing out its credit card or national finances being like a domestic shopping basket pipes up. If you want success, we are told, you have to pay for it. Well, yes. But we are already paying to get the club over that £4.8m income per game mark. And the amount the Club will raise through this most repugnant of decisions is insignificant in the grand football scheme of things. It won’t buy a new striker, it won’t make much of dent in the stadium debt. Hell, it won’t even make much of a contribution to the £6.77m the Club’s directors voted to pay themselves according to the last set of published accounts.

There are three reasons for ending concessionary pricing at Spurs. The first is ideological. The board find it an affront to their very being that anything should be sold anywhere below what they think is the top price it can fetch. The fact that away fans only pay £30 at the Spurs Stadium is something they absolutely hate. The second is that they are utterly detached from everyday reality. Chairman Daniel Levy genuinely thinks – he once said it in a meeting – that all old people are “rich”. And the third is that they are irredeemably greedy. How else can you describe it?

The Club could choose a business model in which some of the income from matchdays, from other events and from spin-off activities such as the skywalk and the go-kart track, was reinvested to keep prices down. This would acknowledge the steep rise in football ticket pricing over the last 30 years, the loyalty and dedication of fans that makes football a business like no other, and simply be a huge PR win that helped the Club retain that special feeling of belonging that Steve Perryman identified when he first walked through the gates all those years ago. And it wouldn’t make the club any less competitive in the transfer market or less able to comply with the game’s Profit and Sustainability Regulations.

But it doesn’t fit with the greed is good ethos. And it doesn’t fit with the Club’s desire to demonstrate exactly who is in charge. To send a message that all the vacuous flim-flam about fan engagement and ticket charters and advisory boards counts for nothing.

But strip aside the faux economics and the power plays and just consider again the basic principle here. Prices are going up and concessions are being axed because fans are living too long. If this isn’t the rubicon that should not be crossed in modern football, I don’t know what is. It’s the application of the kind of thinking German fans rightfully took action in great numbers to prevent coming anywhere near their game recently. You’ve supported us your whole life, now you’re too old to make enough money out of so sod off. It’s not what I understood Audere est facere to mean.

It's the morality, or lack of it, that enrages as much as the economics. And the Club may just have miscalculated by provoking a moral outrage. The biggest backlash I ever saw during my time co-chairing the Club’s Supporters Trust was against the decision to take government money to furlough staff during the pandemic. There was even more anger than when the Club tried to destroy the entire English game by breaking away into a European Super League. As I write this, I see that the grassroots THFC Flags fan group has announced it will not be staging a Tifo display ahead of the home game against Manchester City, saying the withdrawal of senior concessions is “an insult to fans who spend a lifetime following the team”. They are right and it is, and I hope this is the start of a backlash so strong the club is forced to back down.

It is important that happens because if it doesn’t, others will follow. Fans active across the country have been warning about the slow erosion of senor concessions for some time, and there is no doubt all clubs watch what is happening elsewhere to assess exactly how much they can get away with. The Spurs board are probably the most rhino-skinned when it comes to criticism, an attitude partly rooted in an unshakeable belief that they are always right about everything all the time, but even they can be faced down by pressure from the rest of the game. It happened when enough people had enough sense to realise the £30 away price cap might take the edge off the Premier League’s reputation for excessive greed. And the Premier League does not want more reputational damage right now.

Reputation is the big picture, but the bones of this are set out – as they so often are – by Spurs blogger Alan Fisher. I’ll close this latest edition on his words.

“I’ve got some good news for the board. I’m 68 now and beginning to feel it. Both my parents were dead by the time they were 70, so I guess there’s a chance of something in the genes and I won’t have too much longer. Seems obvious to me that the club are irritated by too many of us veterans living so long, and dying could be my final act of support, because my seat will become available. At full price.”

Photo: Martin Cloake