Stop Exploiting Loyalty

It’s safe to say the rise in the price of matchday tickets at Spurs hasn’t gone down well. Just to recap, prices have increased from between £3 and £15 for Category B and Category C games, and between £10 and £17 for Category A games, raising the top price for a single match to £103.

And it’s not just what has been done, but the way that it has been done that is causing anger. The prices, and the fact that they had risen, were hidden in a general statement headlined Match ticket on-sale dates: 2023-24. The Club could have been clear about the rises and the reasons it believed they were justified. It chose not to.

Remember, too, that the Club now offers member tickets in packs of three games, so a member applying for the tickets for the first three home games – two Category A and one Category C – will need to pay at least £172, with a triple pack of the most expensive seats coming in at £286.

The Club will say no one is forced to buy every ticket, and no one is forced to buy the most expensive seats. But it is one of many disingenuous or downright false arguments used in the whole ticketing debate. So, let’s try to demolish a few myths and, in the process, reveal just how little the Club is really telling us about its ticketing policy.

It is true that no one is forced to buy a ticket. But the owners of football clubs know they have a unique product, one that commands brand loyalty like no other. So, to blithely say that a fan can choose to buy tickets for one match if three is too expensive conveniently ignores the nature of fandom. Fans want to see their team, and so it is far more likely applicants will go for all three tickets.

It’s also true that you don’t have to buy the most expensive tickets. But if the cheaper tickets are gone, you have to pay more. The Club chooses not to tell us how many seats at each price point are available. This allows it to go big on how cheap the cheapest tickets are without providing the context of how many there are.

Another thing the Club chooses not to tell us is what its policy on concessions is. Or even that there is a policy. What we do know is that concessions are only available in some parts of the ground. It’s something the Trust has challenged for years, believing that concessions should apply to the person, not the seat. What that means is that if you are of pensionable age, or under 18 or between 18 and 21 years old, you should be charged a concessionary price. But THFC choose not to do that.

Concessionary seats are only available in some sections of the ground. This means if you want to take your kids and there are no concessionary seats left, the kids pay full price. It means if you are a pensioner and there are no concessionary seats left, you pay full price. But there’s worse to come.

If you are a pensioner season ticket holder and your seat is not a concessionary seat, you either have to pay full price, or you have to leave the people you’ve sat with for years and move somewhere else. This can have a profound effect on people, as the emails we used to receive when I helped chair the Supporters’ Trust proved. It’s no way to treat people, but the Club chooses to do so.

But there’s more. The Club has been asked over a number of years to say how many concessionary seats are available in the stadium, and whether there was a cap on the number of concessions offered. The response has been a wall of evasion and obfuscation. Only now has the true picture emerged, because the Club is replying to people asking why they cannot claim a concessionary price by telling them there are no concessions left in their areas. Thereby confirming there is a cap on concessions within blocks. But they still choose not to confirm what level that cap is set at.

The closest to an explanation the Club has ever given for its approach to concessions is that it can’t budget properly if it attaches the price to the person but doesn’t know how many people will qualify for a concessionary price year-on-year. This is utter nonsense. Very few, if any, entertainment businesses can accurately predict the precise breakdown of future audiences. THFC is better placed than most to be able to do so because it has the date of birth of its audience on record. The simple fact is that THFC choose to see a concessionary price as lost income.

All of these choices add up to one big choice the Club is making: the choice to exploit our loyalty. There is another choice that it could make, but first, let’s deal with some of the arguments that regularly come up to counter any objection to increased pricing.

• It’s simple supply and demand. No, it isn’t. Supply and demand does not work in the same way for a football ticket as it does for other consumer goods, because of the loyalty factor. Clubs are supplying something over which they hold a monopoly, giving them the opportunity to manipulate both supply and demand rather than respond to so-called market forces. For proof, on Saturday 8 March 1980 a ticket to see Spurs play Liverpool at White Hart Lane while standing on the East terrace cost £1.50. That is £8.23 in today’s prices. But today, the cheapest ticket in the East Stand to watch Spurs v Liverpool will cost you £83.

• Everything is going up, why not tickets? The Club claims to need to put prices up because costs are increasing, and says it is absorbing costs. And yet food and drink costs in the ground are also increasing. The only people absorbing costs seem to be the fans. In a cost-of-living crisis, the question for the ninth richest club in world football should be ‘Everything is going up, why are tickets?’

• If you want to sign top players, you need to pay top prices and top wages. It’s not necessary to get into a debate about the quality of recruitment here, because this is one of the most nonsensical arguments of the lot. The money the Club raises from tickets is infinitesimal when set against transfer fees and player wages. Even the phenomenal inflation in ticket prices has not created enough money to touch the sides. THFC’s matchday ticket price rise is estimated – we can’t calculate absolutely accurately because the Club chooses not to tell us the breakdown of seats – to raise £2.5 million pounds over the year, or 0.6% of the club’s total income. Who can we buy for £2.5m nowadays? It is just over three month’s wages at £200,000 a week. And if we’re talking about remuneration, let’s not forget the Club’s chairman, already the highest paid in the league, decided he should get a £500,000 bonus. If he’d decided he could get by on just the £3m basic, that would claw back 20% of the income from the ticket price rise. But considerably less than the combined costs of sacking Pochettino, Mourinho, Nuno and Conte, which are conservatively estimated at £40m. Remember, too, that the rise was decided when – as we now know – the club was closing in on netting over £100m for our star player.

• The people to blame are the people buying the tickets at that price. Blaming fans for the bad decisions made by their club is not only wrong, it fails to understand the basic point about fan loyalty that’s already been made. And it lets the real culprits off the hook. Loyalty means fans stretch themselves to afford tickets, and clubs play on that loyalty in order to encourage them to do so. Of course, people are responsible for their own decisions, and a ticket to the match is not a human right. But failing to understand the reality of the transaction between fan and club is a failure to understand football. Blaming the people who buy tickets for the price they pay is a cop-out, just as the call to boycott from those who don’t go to games is.

• There’s nothing we can do about this. Campaigns that are united and focussed can and have succeeded. Fan pressure secured the away price cap of £30, stopped THFC furloughing its staff and killed off the European Super League. This could be the toughest campaign of all, so it needs focus and determination to allow the maximum number of people to exert the maximum amount of pressure.

The Club knows it cannot win the arguments on this. The choices it has made are just that, choices, and another choice is possible.

Tottenham Hotspur could choose to take a lead, to break new ground and make us proud once more by recognising the role match going fans play. It could choose to reward and encourage fan loyalty by keeping prices low. And it could do this by recognising that the income from match tickets is minimal compared to income from other sources – including the spend in the stadium.

It could choose to show it recognises that the passion and dedication of fans contributes to the value of the product it owns and the competitions it plays in. Or it could continue to choose to exploit our loyalty.