Economics is about choices – and one choice is greed

There is a fallacy that economics is a science. That economic decisions are driven by immutable physical reality and that we must deal with what we are dealt as best we can. That is nonsense. Economics is about choice. Plain and simple.

Economist Richard Murphy demonstrates that in a post on his website that addresses the subject of the UK water industry’s current failings and the arguments around nationalisation. I know a long economics post isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if we’re going have this discussion, the detail needs to be got to grips with. Put simply, and at the risk of being simplistic, deciding how much the water industry is worth to its shareholders depends very much on whether you think the cost of the necessary infrastructure investment should be borne by the company or the government. Not science. Just choice.

The decision of the THFC Board to impose big increases in match-day ticket prices for the coming season is a choice. The club, and people who still think economics is a science, will tell you it had no choice. But the fact is, it did. Just as it had a choice to decide not to put season tickets up because it feared the backlash after its bungled managerial appointments had delivered the worst football and final position for years. Just as it had a choice about whether to reimburse its Board members for the cut they took during the pandemic. Just as it had a choice about whether to pay the highest-paid chairman in the Premier League a bonus. The choices you make define who you are.

Tottenham Hotspur is the ninth biggest club by revenue in world football, with Deloitte putting the annual revenue figure at £523m. It is also rated the ninth most valuable in the world by Forbes, which puts a valuation of $2.8bn on the club. Prize money and broadcasting revenue was estimated to bring in $191m in 2022/23. In the analysis of the club’s financial statements for the season to June 2022, the most up to date available, published by the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust, match-day income was £106.1m.

As anyone with the slightest understanding of football finance knows, matchday receipts have been a dwindling proportion of clubs’ total income for years. Back in 2016, Malcolm Clarke, chair of what was then the Football Supporters Federation, pointed out: “On their current £8.3bn [TV] deal, the Premier League could afford to let every single fan in free for every game and still have as much money as they had under the previous deal.” It’s such a mind-boggling fact that it is difficult to comprehend. But it further underlines the relative significance of match-day ticket income. The current TV deal for domestic and overseas rights is worth £10.5bn.

Tottenham Hotspur will raise around £2m over a season by raising the prices on the roughly 10,000 tickets available to buyers at primary source who are not General Admission Season Ticket holders or Premium Season Ticket holders. (It is hard to calculate the precise figure because there are so many price points, and the split of ST holders across those many price points is also unknown.) So the idea that the increase is needed to service the debt (something that is already taken care off due to a smart structuring plan), or to buy players is fanciful.

The argument has been put that everything is going up, so these tickets must go up. If that was a scientific imperative, the Season Tickets would have “had to” go up too, and no amount of squeamishness by the Board about the backlash would have made a difference. But a choice was made. We’re told that inflation is pushing the price of everything up, so operational costs have increased. But what could those operational costs be? Have the club staff had a pay rise? Has there been a rise in what is paid to stewards in order to attract staff in a market where labour is short? Or maybe it is the price of food and drink that has increased, and so this is the operational cost that must be paid for. If that is the case, we can obviously expect no further increase in food and beverage prices at the ground – although we might then express concern at the morality of getting members who have already paid more for their memberships this year to subsidise everyone else.

It is difficult to see this rise as anything else but a choice, and the driver for that choice is greed. Put simply, the club wants to squeeze as much out of us as possible, and damn the consequences. Let’s not forget the rises come on top of prices that are already among the very highest in Europe.

The club knows this is wrong. That’s why the news was sneaked out late on a Friday, with the details buried. You had to click another link within the website story to see the prices and match categorisation, and then work out the increases for yourself. And yet another link to reveal the match-day pricing diagram that, after some examination, showed the further reduction of concessionary areas and cheaper price points. If the club is so confident the rises are justified, why not make the case upfront? The shameful underhandedness of the way this was released shows it knows there is no justification for what it has done.

The timing of the move, coming just one working day before the first meeting of the new Fan Advisory Board, also sent a worrying signal about how the Board views the prospect of any advice from fans at all. The FAB is allowed to discuss the club’s business plan, so it should be able to tell us where this all fits in.

From a PR point of view, it’s another disaster from the specialists in foot-shooting. All the optimism of the new manager, new signings and apparent new approach was swept away in an instant. The club was warned years ago by the Supporters’ Trust when it campaigned on ticketing that the high prices at the new stadium would mean people expected much more on the pitch. That’s contributed to the toxicity of recent years, and, as Alasdair Gold accurately observed on football.london, has immediately made things more difficult for Ange Postecoglou.

One imagines Postecoglou, who comes across as a decent human being, may have his own issues with the move, if the extract from his book that was being widely tweeted over the weekend is anything to go by.

The rises won’t stop here. This is a precursor to comparable Season Ticket price rises next summer. It needs opposing, so we need to make ourselves heard and seen. I can anticipate some of the comments already questioning why I say this now when I have said I wouldn’t support ENIC Out protests. So let’s deal with that first. There’s a world of difference between calling for owners to go when there is no alternative stepping forward, and calling for a change of policy. And I’ve supported and taken part in plenty of price protests over the years – including the ones that secured the £30 away price cap.

Some purely exploratory polling on social media by Kat Law, who many of you will know, indicated that people would support some kind of visual protest outside the stadium, might support something inside, but were worried about doing it at Ange’s first home game. That doesn’t exactly fit with the picture put forward by some of a mass of militancy being held back by biscuit-munching bureaucrats, but it is where we are, and the views of people who want to support their team in whatever way they choose have to be respected.

But, and here’s that thing choice again, I don’t believe we can do nothing. We have to show enough is enough. If we did, we wouldn’t be alone. There is a small but growing feeling among fans at many clubs that we need to make a stand about basic subjects such as pricing and TV scheduling. The boycott of the Charity Shield by Manchester City fans, the successful action taken over a season by German fans to scrap antisocial TV slots, and actions by Liverpool and Bayern Munich fans over ticket prices show that supporters are prepared, if pushed too far, to make the major step of leaving empty seats at grounds.

Visual protest inside stadiums can make a difference because it affects the product and makes advertisers and sponsors nervous. Direct approaches to those advertisers and sponsors about whether they are happy to link their brands with rampant greed can also work. And, while the club’s community work is a genuine positive, questions must be asked about the depth of that commitment when so few of the local community can afford to come to a game.

There’s a choice facing all of us about what sort of club we want. Reversing this decision is a less complex call than full regime change, and action to secure a reversal is capable of bringing a broad range of views together – if people make the choice to let it.

It’s worth remembering the words of Uli Hoeness, former general manager of Bayern Munich, when it comes to ticket prices and choice. (And what irony, in the midst of current transfer speculation, that it should be Bayern). He said: “We could charge more than £104, let’s say we charged £300. We would get £2m more in income but what is £2m to us? In a transfer discussion you argue about that sum for five minutes but the difference between £104 and £300 is huge for the fan.

“We don’t think that the fans are like cows who you milk. Football has got to be for everybody and that is the biggest difference between us and England.”

#FansNotGreed