SOCCER FANS TAKE UMBRAGE
Ticket prices cause stir in Liverpool
“The fans voted with their feet” is an old-time sports expression for that point in a game when a home team is getting annihilated, and the audience has seen enough and heads for the exits.
There’s a deeper meaning to the phrase now in Liverpool, though, where 10,000 fans of the English Premier League soccer club walked out en masse in the (symbolic) 77th minute of the team’s Saturday, Feb. 6 match against Sunderland in protest of ownership’s plans to raise ticket prices to a high-end cost of 77 pounds, or roughly $150 Cdn.
The supporters’ anger was so profound, their demonstration so effective, that the club’s owner, John Henry (of Boston Red Sox and Fenway Sports fame), convened an emergency meeting of his executive team at which it was agreed that a price hike for a traditional EPL powerhouse currently languishing in eighth place might not have been the brightest idea.
The hike was cancelled and the Reds’ subscribers have been assured, by a contrite letter from ownership, that there will be no price increases for the next two years. So chalk one up for the fans. They don’t win too many.
It makes you wonder, though: Why doesn’t this happen more often over here? Are sports teams so fat from TV and sponsorship revenue that they don’t need to listen?
Canadians don’t love hockey any more than the English love soccer, yet here was a fan base from one of the most revered brands in English soccer rising up to say “enough!” Who ever says “enough!” in Canada?
A $150 top ticket for a hockey game doesn’t even cause a wellheeled buyer to blink. Yes, we’ve been well trained to accept it as the cost of doing business.
But is it really? Liverpool fans didn’t think so.
That it was an American sports team owner who tried to squeeze the customers — and felt the Brits’ wrath for it — is not terribly surprising.
Liverpool fans, remember, have had a bellyful of Yankee proprietors, having already been through a disastrous co-ownership by ex-Montreal Canadiens owner George Gillett and ex-Dallas Stars owner Tom Hicks, whom the supporters essentially ran out of town on a rail.
They’re not loving the new guy much better.
Manchester United fans are similarly disenchanted with the deterioration of their club under the Glazer family (Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners). Arsenal is owned by Stan Kroenke, the fellow who just gave St. Louis the bum’s rush and is moving the NFL Rams to L.A. (he also owns the Colorado Avalanche), while two other Americans also own EPL squads, former Cleveland Browns owner Randy Lerner (Aston Villa) and Ellis Short (Sunderland), who also owns Scotland’s Skibo Castle, where Madonna married Guy Ritchie in 2000.
In short, these are not people one should worry about having to go on the dole to keep body and soul together.
They’ll be all right, however the fans feel about them.
But Henry and his executives did finally see that there was a limit to what they could charge for the weak product being served up, and for that, we should all salute the Liverpool faithful.
Over here, we’re not much into organized protest.
There is no hockey equivalent to the Southsiders, for instance, the Vancouver Whitecaps’ most ardent and vocal supporters. The idea of a team’s fan base acting as a group on a strategy widely discussed and agreed upon — whether by social media, or fan newsletter, or the underground grapevine — is not part of the hockey culture.
All we’ve got is market forces, the normal ebb and flow of demand for tickets and merchandise, to provide a correction when teams underachieve. And those forces are far from automatic.
The Toronto Maple Leafs, for example, have been given a free pass to lollygag their way through nearly 50 years of mostly abysmal performance by the ticket buyers’ endless willingness to fork over the dough and never count the cost.
The Vancouver Canucks are feeling the pain, though.
A license to print money during the most successful on-ice decade of their existence, the 10 seasons from 2002 to 2012, the team’s gradual decline to mediocrity has hit them hard at the box office where demand for seats has been as low, by some estimates, as at any time since the mid-1990s.
The Canucks have been unable to sell either the present or the future to a skeptical fan base, and so there are tickets for many a game that their owners can’t give away.
Across the street at B.C. Place, the CFL Lions, their winning timeline and gradual decline echoing those of their hockey cousins, face a similar challenge.
Not a Liverpool-style walkout. It is more subtle than that.
Here, the fans didn’t get up and go all at once.
They did the cost-benefit calculations and made their decisions, one by one.
It will take serious effort, maybe even a little price grovelling, to get them back. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.
The Canucks have been unable to sell either the present or the future to a skeptical fan base so there are tickets for many a game.