Many lower income supporters are being priced out of our game – we need action

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By Steve LongdenTurnstile

Partly due to the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy, my mind has turned to football and how the government could intervene to make our national sport more exciting and accessible. Despite the tough economic times, going to watch a live football match remains one of life’s pleasures. However, it is marred by two problems in particular: extortionate ticket prices and dominance by a moneyed elite.

The BBC has researched the average cost of Premiership season tickets at being £590 for the 2008-9 season. Astonishingly, this works out at over £31 a match (and don’t forget that season tickets work out cheaper than individual tickets pro rata). Tickets are not much cheaper in lower leagues and certainly well above prices charged on the Continent. The effect of years of inflation-busting price increases has been a decline in attendance of live matches as well as a change in the demographic of spectators – many lower-income fans are now being priced out of the game.

Furthermore, competitive leagues become much less exciting when huge disparities are allowed to open up between a small elite at the top, with money to buy the best talent, and the rest. It still seems very unlikely that any team outside the current top four (Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal) will break into it next season. A truly competitive Premiership would have ten teams competing strongly for those places with at least half a dozen capable of becoming Champions.

I think there are two ways of addressing these problems. One is to directly intervene in ticket-pricing. I see no reason why the Government and the football authorities can’t agree to enforce a maximum ticket-price for different levels of the game. If the last year has taught us anything it is that the government must intervene in cases of chronic market failure and the football market is certainly a case of that. If the price of my favourite chocolate bar increases massively then I can quite easily switch to another; it is the threat of transferring loyalty to rival products that allows the market to keep prices competitive. However, proper football fans cannot switch allegiance to save a few quid. As a proud Sheffield United fan, I’d rather go canvassing for the Lib Dems than start supporting Wednesday. Football clubs can currently exploit the tribal loyalty of their fans to ratchet up the cost of supporting their teams.

Another way to reduce ticket prices and improve competitiveness is to mandate clubs to alter their business models. A maximum wage bill as a percentage of a club’s turnover would prevent clubs from overstretching in the transfer market and would put downward pressure on players’ wages. A limit on squad sizes would prevent top clubs from poaching talented youngsters from lower-league clubs. Perhaps more radically, the government and football authorities could follow the Football Supporters Federation’s idea for a quarter of all clubs’ gate and television revenue to be pooled and divided equally between all clubs.

Interfering with how professional sport is organised will not win the next election for Labour; in fact, it may strike readers as being at best tangential and at worst irrelevant when we consider the huge challenges facing Britain. Despite this, I’m convinced that these policies would be popular and would excite the large number of people who regularly attend football matches and those that would do if they had the cash. They are also in tune with Labour values: redistribution, consumer rights, correcting market failure and defending a proud working-class heritage.

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