Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.
Fulham is a delightful club for the neutral to visit two or three times per season. The walk to the ground is unsurpassed in English football: from Putney Bridge Underground station past Hurlingham Books, surely the most picturesque of its kind in London. You walk down the Thames Path past Fulham Palace and through Bishops Park, before dipping down onto Stevenage Road.
That allows you to be welcomed to Craven Cottage by the Johnny Haynes statue; he is an excellent tour guide for someone cast out of bronze.
Take several steps back and you see English stadium heritage in one vista: the cottage, the red brick broken up with the row of small square windows, the dancing glow of the floodlights, the impossibly narrow turnstiles leading to the wooden seats.
That is the unique selling point of Fulham. This is where middle-class sensibilities meet with social history to form a living football museum. You don’t just overlook or forgive the shabbier, less shiny elements; you cherish them.
The new Riverside Stand, looking double its size for everything that it towers over, allows for a west London football safari in padded seats. You can sit and gawp and how things used to be.
Craven Cottage has long created a difficult balance for those tasked with growing Fulham in a sport that fundamentally scoffs at its antiquities.
Fulham have designs on breaking into the Premier League’s top half but, at the last count, their revenue was the 11th highest in the division despite being based in one of the most affluent parts of the country. They were roughly £50m behind West Ham and £15m behind Brighton.
The problem: this stuff tends to take time. Having seemingly overcome their yo-yo years to consolidate back in the Premier League, Fulham still felt like a club on the outside of the elite, their breath fogging up the window as they stared through the glass at someone else’s party. They wanted that to change.
The Riverside Stand was originally slated to open in September 2021 but the project was hampered by delays in demolishing the old stand, Covid-19 lockdowns and difficulties with the construction company.
It is now open to supporters, but the hospitality sections will be completed by summer 2025. Those sections will include a bar with rooftop pool and Michelin-starred restaurant.
“When I first spoke to the Fulham Disabled Supporters Association they gave me some advice and that was that Fulham is the sort of club that can have a business class or first class and have fans that turn left on a plane,” was the quote from Alistair Mackintosh that you hear a lot from Fulham season-ticket holders now.
It does all sound emphatically gauche, a gold-dipped football club. But Fulham supporters can accept the need to cash in on potential high-end customers and, if one of them falls in love and becomes a serious investor or a sponsor, it will have been worth it.
The issue here, the one that has come to define Fulham over the last half decade, is what happens to those who have made that walk along Stevenage Road for decades and who do so every other week rather than twice a year.
Fulham is a football club wrestling with its own identity, of where it has come from, where it wants to go and how that past and future interconnect in the present.
The reconstruction of the Riverside Stand has irrefutably priced some season-ticket holders out of their seats, either to other parts of the ground or away from matches entirely – I’ve spoken to some of them.
The headline price was £3,000, the highest non-corporate season ticket price in English football, but there were significant rises across the board. The high-end corporate section appeared to be bleeding into the areas around it.
“Whilst we understand that Fulham needs to increase its revenues we feel this shouldn’t be at the expense of long-standing loyal supporters,” says Jacqui McCarron, a season-ticket holder and member of the excellent Fulham Lillies fan group.
“Riverside supporters were told that they would be given first refusal on returning to their original seats in the Riverside. However, what they weren’t told was that these tickets would go up by such a huge amount. Before the stand was demolished you could get an adult season ticket for £850. Afterwards, it was a minimum of £1,200 rising up to £3,000.”
Were this a one-off complaint, we could forgive a misjudged decision and understand Fulham’s own dilemma. But we have been here before with this club and with these supporters who love it but are finding it increasingly difficult to like what they hear.
“Fulham’s ticket pricing strategy is dim, short-sighted and shameful” read The i Paper headline in March 2019 after a 2-0 home defeat to 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.
In 2022, for Fulham’s first match back in the Premier League after promotion, there were more protests and more unhappiness after the cheapest adult ticket outside the family area was priced at £65 and some standard tickets were £100.
In October 2023, Fulham supporters held up yellow cards during a match against Manchester United after their club had priced some standard adult tickets in the Riverside Stand at £160, a 60 per cent rise on the previous season.
“It’s a policy which, piece by piece, is alienating a large part of our core fan base to the extent that increasing numbers just can’t afford to come to a game or bring their friends and family to help create that next generation,” said Fulham’s official Supporters’ Trust at the time.
It goes on. Last month, Fulham removed their loyalty points scheme for one game, the away fixture at Chelsea that represents the club’s biggest away game of the season.
Rather than allowing those who had accrued points through attending other fixtures to have priority, at two days’ notice Fulham effectively made it a free-for-all for all season-ticket holders. The lack of notice, according to the Supporters’ Trust, caught people off guard and led to many missing out.
The pricing structure remains eye-watering. Tickets are currently on sale for the home game against Manchester United on 26 January. In the Riverside, the cheapest adult ticket is £150 and a child will pay at least £70. The cheapest adult ticket outside the family section is £67 and that is only available in two blocks of the Hammersmith Stand.
If the pricing strategies themselves have angered supporters, it has been exacerbated by what they call a misguided communication strategy.
Discussing the introduction of a £12,000 corporate season ticket in the Riverside Stand, Mackintosh made his feelings perfectly clear: “The attention is on the top-end pricing as it is more interesting to report than the bottom end, but our game against Villa is sold out.”
His point is a reasonable one: the business of football is business. If you can sell your tickets for a match at £150, then why would you sell them for anything less? This is simple supply and demand, folks.
Which is fine, except that Fulham have pretended to be different when it suits. They have always traded on heritage, history and tradition: the club website uses the tagline “London’s original football club”.
In May 2020, owner Shahid Khan praised supporters for the community spirit demonstrated during the pandemic and promised that, in the years to come, there would be “no loss in the sense of family, tradition and belief that are signatures of Fulham Football Club”.
This ticket price strategy has to erode those purportedly important elements. There is no great mystery here.
If you charge a minimum £440 for a family of four to watch a Premier League match in one of the stands of your stadium, and if prices are increased so significantly for the highest-profile opponents, you are not aiming your product at local Fulham supporters.
You are aiming to fill those seats with tourists, either from elsewhere in the country or from abroad.
Football clubs – and this is clearly not just Fulham – love these tourist supporters because they are minute gold mines.
The average season-ticket holder will go straight to their seat, may take their own snacks and are likely to make one or two visits per season to the club shop. Swap them out for a different infrequent supporter every week and the revenue potential per seat goes through the roof.
But there’s two obvious problems with this. Firstly, according to Fulham’s last published accounts, gate receipts represented only eight per cent of the highest posted annual revenue in Fulham’s history. It was dwarfed by broadcasting, commercial and prize revenue.
That suggests, fairly or otherwise, that the raise in prices is not just a maximisation of the supply and demand principle but a means of pricing out local supporters to ensure that they are less likely to attend and that more seats will go to those first-time visitors.
All the long-term supporters are asking for is for the business model not to target those who can least afford to pay more, given the revenue (and spending) in other areas. They understand that gratitude is owed to Khan for financing the club, but his promises about understanding the importance of the tradition and heritage overlook the role of supporters within that history.
“Fulham only exists because of the loyal supporters who in the 1980s fought off developers who wanted to merge Fulham with QPR and sell off the ground,” says McCarron.
Fulham 4-1 Watford (Thursday 9 November)
- Game no.: 54/92
- Miles: 246
- Cumulative miles: 9,095
- Total goals seen: 152
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: Does it have to be football? The piles and piles of books at the Hurlingham shop on the walk to Craven Cottage.
“Again in the early 2000s, Fulham supporters blocked plans by the then owner Mohamed Al Fayed when he sold Craven Cottage.
“As with all supporters a football club is much more than the 90 minutes of football. It is generations of families coming together, communities such as the Fulham Lillies providing help and support.
“It is sad to think that future generations will be priced out due to short-sighted decisions to make money now and not think about a longer term strategy.”
It also smacks a little of inherent arrogance. Fulham have been relegated three times in the last 11 seasons. This club had an average attendance as low as 4,700 in 1993-94 and 9,000 in 1997-98.
It is hardly unthinkable that if you alienate supporters by pricing them out, they will find other ways to spend their money and will not return if performances go sour and – supply and demand returns! – ticket prices go down.
To a neutral, this is all pretty dispiriting because it seems so damn unnecessary. Fulham is a magnificent football club and Craven Cottage is a wonderful place to watch them. They had a reputation as a family club that they worked to maintain during their accelerated rise through the divisions.
It won’t take too much to improve relationships and simmer down anger. Broken trust means that some won’t return, and that should be a cause of real shame.
Somewhere along the line, in their pursuit of becoming part of English football’s elite, Fulham need to find a way of doing it that doesn’t lose the faith of those who were here long before that was even a pipe dream.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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