Hold your nerve. Stick to the plan. We’re all in this together. Your rent is going through the roof and your bills are turning red, and your local supermarket has started putting security tags on the cheese, but the sunlit uplands are at hand. Desperate parents are stealing baby formula and corporate profit margins are fattening and there seem to be a lot more mattresses on the street these days, but trust the process. And in the meantime, try to avoid asking for a pay rise, buying branded goods or watching live sport.
Full disclosure: I’m probably not the best person to be writing about the rising cost of attending sport in this country. I get to do it for free. It’s the most pathetic excuse for a job yet invented. Likewise, among the sports media as a whole, ticket prices have always been something of a blind spot: a war we so rarely have to fight, a huge segment of the sporting experience to which, with a cheery wave of a lanyard, we remain largely oblivious. But really it’s time somebody started kicking up a fuss, because it’s getting ridiculous out there.
“We are acutely aware that everyone is currently impacted by the rising cost of living,” Tottenham announced in April, as they froze season-ticket prices for the 2023-24 season. “We recognise the ongoing commitment our fans continue to make,” the club added. Begrudging grunts of approval all round. Spurs finally get it. Spurs, the Premier League side most famous for punching themselves in the face, decide to stop punching themselves in the face.
Well, for about three months. Last week the club quietly increased its match-day ticket prices by around 20%: more in some areas, less in others. The cheapest adult ticket to watch the home games against Wolves or Nottingham Forest is now £48, a price that applies to only a tiny sliver of seats. The list of premium Category A fixtures (£65-£103) has been subtly extended. Many parts of the ground do not offer child discounts. “Our match ticket prices are comparable to other London clubs,” Tottenham argued, as if disgruntled Spurs fans were ever going to form an orderly queue outside the Emirates or Stamford Bridge instead.
This, of course, is the subtext of the whole exercise. If you’re a loyal Spurs fan who wants to see them live, you’re trapped. There are no other clubs. There is no Lidl own-brand mince to which you can downgrade. What is a fair price for a ticket? It is exactly what the club says it is, and you will fork it out for as long as you are able: not so much pay-what-you-can, as pay-until-you-can’t. Once you no longer generate sufficient financial value for Enic Group, it will replace you with somebody richer. Maybe that someone richer was you once. Well, circle of life and all that.
And of course Spurs are just the sticky time-sensitive example here. Promoted Sheffield Wednesday have just announced a top-price ticket of £59 to watch – with the greatest of respect to the Championship – the Championship. Stockport County tried to charge fans £27 to watch League Two football, only to cut their prices again after a huge backlash. For smaller sports, meanwhile, the window of opportunism is far smaller, which in this straitened post-pandemic landscape has ignited some spectacular increases.
Take the Friday of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. I don’t fully understand the appeal of watching cars not racing each other, but in 2019 the market valued a ticket for the first practice session at £50, and now it costs £169. The cheapest adult tickets for the Ashes Test at Old Trafford were around £40 in 2019 and about £60 this week. The Wimbledon ground pass – once a cheap and cheerful way of introducing children to grand slam tennis – now costs £27.
In a way this is a process that has been under way for years, a slow boil of avarice and speculation, a gradual socioeconomic cleansing of the sporting audience. We tend to hear lots of prevarication about “the wider economic picture”, about the rising cost of energy and supplies, about the basic inevitability of the doom spiral. Hold your nerve, guys. We’re in this together. Once energy costs come down, interest rates peak and supply chains free up, the clubs and governing bodies who leaned on you so heavily during the hard times will surely drop their prices again as a reward for your devotion. The £20 Premier League ticket is just a few turbulent economic cycles away. Trust the plan.
People in sport love talking about all the good that sport does. As a communal experience, as a teacher of values, as a form of exercise, as a source of joy and wonder and inspiration, as an expression of local and national pride, as an extension of identity, as a safe space, as a pillar of the community. So what does it say about a sport when it seeks to court the most affluent audience possible, when it raises its barriers to entry, when a whole generation of people – disproportionately young, disproportionately non-white – is being walled out, priced out, cut adrift?
Perhaps that only rich people deserve good things. Perhaps that the worth of a person is bound up in their ability to pay for stuff. In this respect you might observe that British sport serves as a depressing analogue for Britain at large. But that’s another column for another day.
