Capitalism and popular culture do not always make comfortable bedfellows, especially when the bed is football. The Premier League’s new £5.1 billion domestic TV rights deal has brought calls for lower ticket prices.
It is tough, on one level, to argue against this: subsidising the price of stadium attendance for loyal fans seems intuitively a far better use of money than further inflating the wages or transfer fees paid to, or for, already super-rich players. You might say that, in some cases, paying down debt would make even more sense. Then again, with UK interest rates so low, it can be argued that debt is currently good value and that a certain amount of it hence constitutes sensible business practice.
I can, however, think of two reasons why cutting ticket prices below what the market would sustain is not necessarily as good an idea as it sounds.
First, with competition keen and the penalties for relegation potentially crippling, clubs may, with some justification, fear that if they don’t maximise revenues and therefore spending power, they might start losing out in the market for players to rivals who do charge whatever the market will bear for tickets. That might, in turn, result in them sliding down the table to the considerable displeasure of the very fans they were trying to help.
If the club is loss-making, moreover, Financial Fair Play (FFP) makes it even harder to justify voluntarily forgoing revenue by charging prices lower than those that would fill the stadium.
Second and, I would argue, more seriously, as the worldwide success of the league as audiovisual entertainment gathers momentum, the contribution to clubs’ overall economic wellbeing of old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness fans trudging through the turnstiles week in week out gets smaller and smaller.
Looking at the figures we so far have for financial results of Premier League clubs in 2013-14 – the first season of the current cycle of Premier League TV deals, which produced just as positive a result for the clubs as the new deal running from August 2016 to May 2019 – by and large they repeat the same pattern. That is to say, TV revenues, including those from overseas, are generating a bigger and bigger proportion of overall revenues.
At Everton, broadcasting accounted for 73.4% of overall turnover, up from 64.5% just a year earlier; at West Ham United, the figure for broadcast and central sponsorship distributions was 65.6%.
By contrast, match receipts and related football activities generated just 17% of turnover at West Ham; gate receipts and programme sales contributed 16% of turnover at Everton.
In the first year of the new deal in 2016-17 it does not seem far-fetched to suggest that four out of every five pounds that the Merseyside club produces could come from TV.
When those are the economic realities, it seems to me that clubs have little choice but to prioritise keeping the TV companies happy and, by extension, put the interests of armchair fans above the faithful in the stands.
If you then cut the price of tickets, you accentuate this well-established trend and dilute the strictly economic value of live spectators to Premier League clubs that little bit faster.
Of course, match-day spectators do retain some power over and above the direct monetary contribution that they make to the clubs they worship. For one thing, they serve, in effect, as unpaid extras, creating the expectant, excited atmosphere that TV producers presumably want. The fact that many matches are beamed around the world also magnifies the potential impact of any mass demonstration or protest they decide to embark on.
By and large, though, you cannot escape the conclusion that if TV provides the bulk of the clubs’ revenue, then, when push comes to shove, it is TV more and more that will call the tune.
I feel a bit sorry for mature fans of Premier League clubs. After all, if you have supported a team for 30 years, most fans would sooner change gender than switch allegiance.
Even so, it seems to me that the case for cutting ticket prices would be far stronger if the Premier League were the only game in town. Of course, it isn’t; there are hundreds of other football clubs people can go and watch if they so choose. And if Premier League grounds gradually become the exclusive preserve of the privileged classes as a consequence of the law of supply and demand, well, it is not so different to what the London property boom has done to the likes of Notting Hill and Battersea.
As one whose first regular spectator experiences came on the terraces of Taunton Town in about the 65th tier of English football, I feel a responsibility to try to explain to kids, before they fall prey to the marketing machine, that you can get just as much of a thrill out of supporting Accrington Stanley as opposed to Arsenal, Paris FC not Paris Saint-Germain. If mediocrity is the norm, then flashes of brilliance mean much more. And while you may be mocked for your allegiance early doors, you will be a cool teen because you didn’t follow the herd.
While economic arguments tend not to cut much ice with 10 year-olds, you will also, arguably, be contributing to the long-term health of the sport by doing your bit to ensure that the money going into it is more evenly distributed. And, when you get home, you can still enjoy the Premier League via the medium through which the vast majority of people now experience it: on TV.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.