Everton have frozen season ticket prices for the fourth year running – they should be applauded

They call Everton ‘The People’s Club’. Though football may no longer be the people’s game, the Goodison Park hierarchy seem to take their nickname seriously.

While the last few weeks have been one depressing story after another for the Premier League – from the hateful selfishness of a mooted superleague breakaway and self-seeking ‘Premier League 2’, to the shameless £5m golden handshake for outgoing chief executive Richard Scudamore – this weekend provided some respite from bitter disaffection with the news that Everton plan to freeze season ticket prices for 2019-20, their fourth campaign in a row without a price rise.

Though Everton are not the only Premier League club with a sense of social responsibility, they are certainly one of the most visible in the local community. Freezing ticket prices is in keeping with this ethos: there is no better way to strengthen the bonds between a football club and its fanbase than to make sure that supporters can reasonably afford to attend matchday.

| ALL Season Ticket prices frozen for 2019/20! #EFC pic.twitter.com/u5N78064fq

— Everton (@Everton) November 18, 2018

This might seem self-evident to most of us, but it is clearly not obvious to every football club. While the majority of football fans see their clubs as community assets over which they, the people, have moral ownership, clubs are increasingly vehicles for maximum private profit in practice. The reality is that the grand old institutions of English football are now assets on the balance sheets of a select group of billionaires, many of them treated as little more than desirable real estate. That, for one, explains the insidious logic of ticket pricing in the Premier League which – with Everton as a notable exception – still widely prevails.

The rise of TV money

Economically speaking, selling tickets has never been less important in the Premier League. Where once gate receipts were the financial lifeblood of every football club, the top flight is currently in the process of sharing out a domestic television rights deal worth a record £5.14bn. With the current deal set to expire in 2019, its successor is thought to be worth roughly the same if not slightly less. Any shortfall is likely to be offset by an increase in the value of international rights, however, meaning Premier League clubs will continue to rake in hundreds of millions from broadcasting rights alone.

Read more: Neville Southall: Why Everton fans shouldn’t hate ‘sheep’ Ross Barkley

So, despite finishing bottom last season with 31 points and producing several performances under Alan Pardew which were unfit to be televised, West Brom received around £95m in prize money from the Premier League predominantly made up of broadcasting revenue. Manchester City, the champions, received just under £150m. These gargantuan sums do not take into account spiralling income from sponsorship deals, lucrative overseas partnerships, hospitality, advertising, retail and so on. Nonetheless, it is television money which has changed the economic landscape of football.

By comparison, gate receipts often just about break into the tens of millions for smaller Premier League clubs each financial year. While that ticks up towards a nine-figure sum for clubs in the top six, gate money is generally dwarfed by television income. With takings on the gate often an afterthought relative to income from broadcasting, it makes sense for clubs to freeze ticket prices. Fans have long made the case for tickets being too expensive. Back in 2011, it was reported that ticket prices at some top-flight clubs had increased 1,000 per cent over two decades, with the onset of the Premier League era in 1992 – the glossy corporate rebrand to end all glossy corporate rebrands – coinciding with massive inflation in the cost of matchday at the expense of fan satisfaction, experience and atmosphere.

False choice

Though some Premier League clubs seem to have heeded this argument, others have not. While 11 clubs decided to freeze season ticket prices going into the 2018-19 season, there were above-inflation increases at Tottenham, Newcastle, Crystal Palace, Watford, Wolves, Fulham, Cardiff, West Ham and Manchester City. According to The Mirror, the cheapest adult season ticket at Wolves went up 32.5 per cent – the biggest increase compared to last season – while Fulham had the second biggest price hike at 17 per cent. Both clubs were promoted from the Championship last season and might have been expected to implement modest increases, but not such a blatant cash grab on the basis of an achievement which wouldn’t have been possible without their fans.

Dear @FulhamFC. Ticket prices for the home game v West Ham. I can take the bad performances. But this? Still £55-£75 for a home game? pic.twitter.com/z9rWnEfCyX

— Archie Rhind-Tutt (@archiert1) November 7, 2018

While loyalty offers on renewals and ‘early bird’ deals mean that many season ticket holders avoid the steepest price rises, that doesn’t take into account one-off matchday admissions. When asked about a rise in the cost of matchday tickets at a meeting with the Fulham Supporters’ Trust, Fulham claimed this was all part of the club’s aim to become “more commercial”. This is a common argument when a club wants to raise ticket prices, whether season tickets or matchday admissions: commercial strategy dictates that tickets must become more expensive if the club wants to stay competitive. It only takes one look at enormous television revenues in comparison to the trifling extra income raised by admission fees to see that this is a false choice.

In this light, it’s hard not to feel that a club becoming “more commercial” means they want a better class of customer. Lower-income fans being priced out of matchday may as well be an official Premier League brand value at this stage. When Fulham host West Ham at Craven Cottage in December a standard adult ticket will cost between £55 and £75, equivalent to well over half a day’s work on the London Living Wage. From an economic perspective this is completely unnecessary, a drop in the ocean for the club’s finances which makes fans feel like they are being wrung dry.

Freezes needed for the foreseeable

Football is, historically, a working-class game, fostered in local communities across Britain and made lucrative by their dedicated backing. The Premier League well knows that: much of their marketing has attempted to exploit working-class authenticity and sell that romance to a global audience. This is one of the reasons that a £5m bonus for Scudamore “for his exceptional contribution to the success of the [Premier] League” has gone down so badly: the Premier League is successful because of the loyalty and perseverance of its fans, not because someone negotiated a series of exorbitant deals for its broadcasting rights.

Continuing price increases for season tickets and matchday admissions can only take the game further and further away from the communities upon which it relies, a commercial strategy which might eke out a little extra profit today but in the long term can only be self-defeating. That’s why Everton have the right idea in freezing season ticket prices over multiple seasons, decreasing the burden on their supporters because it would be entirely gratuitous to do otherwise. Every club, promoted or otherwise, could freeze season tickets and matchday admissions for the foreseeable if they wanted to.

If there is one benefit of the television money which has flooded the Premier League, it is that there is less of an onus on fans to subsidise their football clubs on matchday. Clubs should recognise that, rather than continue to raise prices simply because they can.