£8bn REASONS TO CUT PRICES
New TV deal leaves bloated clubs with no excuse for bleeding the supporters dry
WHEN Barclays Premier League clubs learned the staggering size of the TV deal that will begin next season, they rightly thought it would change the face of English football once again. What they didn’t expect was that, ultimately, it would put them at odds with their own supporters.
For many years, as the scale and self-love of the Premier League has grown, those who attend games have paid heavily for the privilege. It has long been an irritant but the clubs sought to justify it, albeit weakly, by arguing that seeing many of the world’s best players on our football fields every weekend comes at a price. Transfer values have to be met, wages (and agents) have to be paid.
The moment Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore stood up in London last February and announced that clubs would share an astonishing £8billion from the 2016- 2019 TV deal, however, that line of reasoning crashed to the floor.
Big English football clubs no longer need supporters’ money to pay their players’ wages. They certainly don’t need as much of it, if any at all. The finances driving our clubs onwards and upwards comes from sponsorship, commerce and, above all, TV companies who seem happy to invest so much of their viewers’ subscriptions and licence fees in this product.
The debate about ticket prices has been with us for a while thanks to groups such as the Football Supporters Federation. It is TV and all associated with it, however, that has driven our clubs to a point today where there should no longer be a debate. Simply, there is no longer an argument to which they can cling.
The actions of Liverpool supporters at Anfield on Saturday have helped bring the issue into sharper focus. Their 77th-minute walk-out in protest at prices (£ 77 was intended to be a new top-end ticket cost at the redeveloped Anfield) has already edged their club towards dialogue and the fact the club’s manager Jurgen Klopp recently worked at a German club where two seasons ago match tickets were selling for as little as £9 has only added to the sense of embarrassment on Merseyside.
Liverpool are not alone, of course. They have just been unfortunate to have timed their announcement at the time a storm was brewing. As such they have found themselves in the eye of it.
No, across the country clubs have been pushing the envelope as far as they possibly can on ticket prices. It was inevitable that at some stage we would reach this point.
Stubbornness remains, of course, and it perhaps will do for a little longer. Only last week, for example, Sportsmail revealed how seven or eight Premier League clubs voted against a proposal to restrict the cost of away tickets to £30, leaving the vote short of the 14 hands it needed to be carried.
However, the clubs will convene again in March and talk the issue through once more. By then it is likely the environment will be a little different, the focus on that meeting a little sharper. It will be interesting to see if some of the dissenting clubs have reconsidered.
Already, one or two clubs have broken ranks to speak publicly on the issue. Their rivals in the Premier League will perhaps not thank West Ham or Stoke, for example, but the football community as a whole perhaps will.
Stoke, and their owner and chairman Peter Coates, have led the way on this issue. Season ticket prices have been kept down for some time now while coach travel to away games has been paid for by the club.
West Ham, meanwhile, claimed recently that they could have pitched season tickets at a higher level and still sold them.
‘ It will cost us about £ 5m,’ co- owner David Sullivan told Sportsmail recently.
‘Believe me, that won’t make the difference between buying Cristiano Ronaldo and not buying him. Set against other revenues, ticket income is not as important as it once was.’
Observers may note that West Ham are about to move in to a new, larger stadium at the Olympic Park that they haven’t had to pay to build. It’s a reasonable point.
Nevertheless, Sullivan’s own point is valid and returns us to the heart of the issue — that our clubs charge theseth pricesi not tb because th they need d to be but because they can and they want to.
The average age of adults attending Premier League games is currently beyond 40 and maybe economic reasons are to blame. Perhaps that is why some clubs, including Liverpool last week, refer to them as ‘customers’.
In advance of the start of next season’s competition, there stands a clear opportunity to change this. Nobody is asking our clubs to give tickets away, only to recognise more accurately the means of those who have traditionally been the bedrock of the game. On announcing the TV deal and hearing calls for change last year, Scudamore said: ‘We’re not set up for charitable purposes. We are set up to be the best football competition.’
That may be true but he and others like him must surely realise now that the Premier League can be the best league in the world without necessarily being the worst at the same time.