“Fulham’s ticket pricing strategy is dim, short-sighted and shameful” read our headline in March 2019 after a 2-0 home defeat by Manchester City. Before and during that game, Fulham-supporting volunteers handed out flyers protesting their club’s inflated ticket prices. “Stop the greed” was their simple message.
Three years on, Fulham fans fight the same fight. In March, season ticket prices in their newly renovated Riverside stand were announced, with £1,000 for an adult the headline figure; the supporters’ trust were understandably alarmed.
Last week, another blow: for the Liverpool match on the opening weekend of the Premier League season, the cheapest adult ticket outside the family area is £65. Some standard adult tickets are £100.
There is more devil in the detail. Over-65s, many of whom have been going to Craven Cottage for many decades, are given only a £5 discount on full adult price – except in the Riverside where they must pay the full £100. Children, often given at least a 50 per cent discount on match tickets at other clubs, will be admitted at a cost of between £50 and £70 in the Riverside, Putney and Johnny Haynes stands.
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Flawless Mead to defiant White - How England crushed Norway on their way to record Euros win11 July, 2022The most nonsensical aspect of the pricing strategy is that it provides little immediate monetary gain for overwhelmingly bad PR. Let’s say, for the purposes of hypothesis, that Fulham make 10,000 tickets available for each of their 19 home league games. Reducing the cost of those tickets by £20 each would cost the club £3.8m a year. Last season, the team that finished 18th in the Premier League received roughly £105m in broadcasting revenues.
Having heard the criticism over the ticket pricing in 2019 and again in March, we have to assume that this is a willful strategy. Perhaps Fulham are leaning into their geography and social demographics, branding themselves as English football’s upper-class club. Order two tonnes of Marie Rose sauce and all the prawns you can buy. Start constructing the Dom Perignon bar. This is English football, with the corners smoothed over.
There is no great mystery here. If you charge that much for tickets, you are pricing out a large section of your traditional fanbase, including the potential next generation of Fulham supporter. You are deliberately attracting the tourists, the one-timers and the fairweather-ers.
You are choosing to prioritise matchday revenue over atmosphere and the connection between the club and its community.
Which would all be a little easier for existing supporters to stomach if they weren’t continually told how much those in charge care about them. In May 2020, owner Shahid Khan wrote a statement in which he praised fans for their community spirit in coming together during the pandemic, having the gall to promise that there would be “no loss in the sense of family, tradition and belief that are signatures of Fulham Football Club”. The foot soldiers of that tradition may now have to stay at home.
Fulham have always traded on being a quaint, family club – their club website contains the tagline “London’s original football club” – and for good reason. You forgive the slightly down-at-heel wooden seats because you have come here to see them. They are a part of Fulham, like Haynes, Hill, Robson and Stock and all who have sat watching them. One day we all know they will go, hoovered up in the name of progress, and with them a part of what makes Fulham, Fulham. Supporters will rue it, but they will understand it too.
But they cannot understand why change must bring with it such rapacity. At a time when energy prices are soaring and disposable income is decreasing, when loyal fans again need their clubs to distract them from the grind, Fulham have taken a different step. The tickets will sell, of course. But has Fulham’s identity been put up for sale with them?
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