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The Price of Football


Greenridge
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These studies are a complete waste of time, there's far too many variables to be able to apply any context to the numbers.

 

Taking the pie thing as an example, yes, Kidderminster charge a lot for their pies, but they're ****ing massive and REALLY good quality. They sell out EVERY game.

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These studies are a complete waste of time, there's far too many variables to be able to apply any context to the numbers.

 

Taking the pie thing as an example, yes, Kidderminster charge a lot for their pies, but they're ****ing massive and REALLY good quality. They sell out EVERY game.

 

I think they have some value in that they shine a spotlight on prices and will hopefully stop some clubs jacking up prices too much because it will be highlighted and criticised.

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These studies are a complete waste of time, there's far too many variables to be able to apply any context to the numbers.

 

Taking the pie thing as an example, yes, Kidderminster charge a lot for their pies, but they're ****ing massive and REALLY good quality. They sell out EVERY game.

Their soup is pretty damn fine too...

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Who gives a stuff about the price of a pie or a cup of tea? You either buy it or you don't. If you don't it's not vital and doesn't impact on the main reason you are there, which is to watch the football. The price of the ticket is the main thing, and everything else is peripheral and not hugely relevant. If you want a pie and think they are too expensive at the ground, buy one before you get to the ground. If the beer is too expensive and too nasty, go to a pub not a football stadium.

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Who gives a stuff about the price of a pie or a cup of tea? You either buy it or you don't. If you don't it's not vital and doesn't impact on the main reason you are there, which is to watch the football. The price of the ticket is the main thing, and everything else is peripheral and not hugely relevant. If you want a pie and think they are too expensive at the ground, buy one before you get to the ground. If the beer is too expensive and too nasty, go to a pub not a football stadium.

 

Not easy to pop out to the pub at H/T

 

Agree it all gets a bit boring. Saw they even we're counting down to it. Like teh Sunday Times rich list becomes endless media filler.

That Kidderminsteraf95120755156dc3f35630cd6716f66f.jpg pie looks delicious though

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I think they have some value in that they shine a spotlight on prices and will hopefully stop some clubs jacking up prices too much because it will be highlighted and criticised.

 

Unfortunately their FL study produced a load of figures which were utter nonsense and I can no longer take any of the BBC's research into football costs seriously. Their methodology is utter garbage - as Steve pointed out at the time, they basically took total revenue and divided it by attendance to get a "average cost per person" ticket price figure, which as a result meant the "average" was about £5 cheaper than any adult ticket I'd ever bought at the normal price in each division (with the exception of the one-off of Fans' Friday in Accrington when my Saints ST meant I got in for £10 instead of £19 - but that was an exception, not the norm which the BBC were claiming).

 

As a result of their recent shoddiness, I can't take this seriously.

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Who gives a stuff about the price of a pie or a cup of tea? You either buy it or you don't. If you don't it's not vital and doesn't impact on the main reason you are there, which is to watch the football. The price of the ticket is the main thing, and everything else is peripheral and not hugely relevant. If you want a pie and think they are too expensive at the ground, buy one before you get to the ground. If the beer is too expensive and too nasty, go to a pub not a football stadium.

 

Equally there's nothing in the price that covers the quality - my desperation half time pie at Chelsea was burnt to a crisp in the bottom and half of it was just black inedible crunch - anything more than a quid for that was awful value, I think it was about £4. You're right that the prices only matter if you're going to buy one anyway, but it does ignore the monopoly the clubs have on in-ground food prices when you're a captive audience. At least we're not at the cinema though.

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I see we have the most expensive programme in the EPL.

 

We've also given it away to 30,000 people at both the Europa League qualifiers, which won't be referenced anywhere.

 

I haven't bought a home one all season (though I picked a few up at the EL games), bought one at every away match I've been to though.

Edited by The9
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I think the price of pies and beer is irrelevant. If it's expensive don't buy, surely most people can go a couple of hours without beer and pies. If you can't, there must be something wrong. It's the cost of match day tickets that is the scandal, with all the cash that is sloshing around in the game. Blatter, Platini, Ronaldo and Rooney's cash has to come from somewhere.

 

Not sure why the price of tickets to watch the women's super league is even relevant to the study either. I don't think anyone is planning to go and watch that because it's cheaper. I believe a lot of the tickets to watch ladies football are even given away!

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These studies are a complete waste of time, there's far too many variables to be able to apply any context to the numbers.

 

Taking the pie thing as an example, yes, Kidderminster charge a lot for their pies, but they're ****ing massive and REALLY good quality. They sell out EVERY game.

 

Equally there's nothing in the price that covers the quality - my desperation half time pie at Chelsea was burnt to a crisp in the bottom and half of it was just black inedible crunch - anything more than a quid for that was awful value, I think it was about £4. You're right that the prices only matter if you're going to buy one anyway, but it does ignore the monopoly the clubs have on in-ground food prices when you're a captive audience. At least we're not at the cinema though.

 

It's quite clear from these and other comments that we need a pie chart so that we can compare one club against the others.

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Quite remarkable that mancity sells season tickets for 300 quid (the cheapest). Yup, that's me being Dutch, I know...

I would imagine there are very few season tickets available at that price, they'll have picked a small subsection of the ground to put these cheap season tickets knowing that it'll get picked up on these surveys and publicised, thereby making them look better for the fans than their rivals.

 

In reality, they're as bad (if not worse) as the rest - they recategorised one of their disabled areas in the summer which saw season tickets in that section cost rise from £350 to £975. :uhoh:

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There are few things I spend my money on that give me greater pleasure than a season ticket at St.Marys. For the outlay, it provides ongoing, regular entertainment that is hard to match elsewhere and definitely not like-for-like.

 

Sure, the argument will be I could watch lower-league football. But you can apply that logic to any item where the price increases with the quality of the product (food, clothes, cars, hotels etc).

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Equally there's nothing in the price that covers the quality - my desperation half time pie at Chelsea was burnt to a crisp in the bottom and half of it was just black inedible crunch - anything more than a quid for that was awful value, I think it was about £4. You're right that the prices only matter if you're going to buy one anyway, but it does ignore the monopoly the clubs have on in-ground food prices when you're a captive audience. At least we're not at the cinema though.

 

I think it a taken that the food at a football stadium is complete garbage.

 

But why? It's bloody expensive as it is. I guess I wouldn't mind too much paying over the odds if the food wasn't something fit for my dogs, and I might once in a while buy something. Instead if it is a lunch time game, I'll get off the train and go to the Co-op and get a sandwich. I'd rather give my money to SFC than Co-op but not if they serve dog food. Last season they had a coffee stall outside the ground for one of the games. Was that just a one off or family day thing? As it was, the young girls manning it had no idea how to make a cup of coffee, so I binned it but it would have been nice if they knew what they were doing.

 

And yes, cinemas are even worse.

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What I found unbelievable was season ticket prices, Arsenal something like 2.5grand.

 

Barcelona on the other hand is 90pound!!!!

They're numbers taken out of context though, like the vast majority of the headline figures.

 

Most of Arsenal's season tickets are just over £1000. Still a truckload of cash, but included in that price are the first five home cup games (not League Cup, as they do £10 tickets for that competition) per season, so you get 24 games for the money rather than the 19 most PL season ticket holders get. If they don't play 5 home cup games in a season (drawn away in the FA Cup, for example), you get a credit for the following season.

 

With Barcelona, there are a severely limited number of season tickets at that low price, in order to be eligible for one you have to be a club member ("socio") which costs around £100 a year, and then there's a multi-year waiting list.

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What's the situation in Germany?

 

I chose this at random: http://www.borussia.de/english/tickets.html and they do seem an awful lot cheaper.

 

But here - http://www.hsv.de/fileadmin/redaktion/Tickets/Saison_2015_2016/Einzelspiele/Preislisten/1online.pdf - seems not too much different from over here.

 

Juve - http://www.juventus.com/en/tickets/season-tickets/new-season-tickets-2015-16/index.php - have some cheap and some expensive

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The general situation in Germany is that the seated tickets effectively subsidise the standing ones, and at the bigger clubs, getting hold of a terrace ticket for a one-off game is more or less impossible without going via the black market. As you'd expect, some clubs are more expensive than others, but terrace tickets for away fans are almost always less than €20 - it's pretty common for travelling fans to launch protests against any tickets that are more than that, and their protest will be a proper one where they'll turn up outside the ground, do their stuff with banners, chanting, etc, but won't buy the tickets. They realise that if they give the home club their money, it's a tacit acceptance that they're charging a fair price. They take the sacrifice of missing the game in the belief that it'll help in the long term. Something people in this country generally aren't prepared to do.

 

In Italy it seems to almost be a "class" system - tickets behind the goals are pretty cheap, while "VIP" seats on the side are insanely expensive, designed to keep the riff-raff out. If you watch Serie A games on TV, at most stadia you'll see big concentrations of fans behind the goal, a smattering of people in the premium halfway-line seats, and then vast gaps of nothingness in between. Those gaps only ever get filled for the really big games.

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