Connect with us

Features

Manchester City release unnecessary Season Ticket price increases – A Week in the City

Published:

15:37

on

| Last Updated:

15:37

on

I am relatively (very relatively) infamously not a season ticket holder at Manchester City. My breaking point was the European Super League and City’s part in the whole ordeal, no matter how big or small it was. It was a decision I felt I could no longer financially support and so I’ve been a staunch holder of an Oldham Athletic season card (yes, some clubs do still give out physical cards) ever since.

If you want a laugh, you can look through the replies and quote tweets of the below, when BBC Radio Manchester put out an edited version of an interview I did with them (at the request of the BBC, I must stress) in the aftermath of Ferran Soriano’s apology for the fiasco, which basically made it look like I’d renounced all love for Manchester City and had ripped all of my Moonchester posters off the wall, replacing them with a shrine to Chaddy the Owl.

The real reason I even mentioned it was because I was on there with Mike Keegan, who I knew was an Oldham fan, and we joked about it on air, yet somehow that didn’t make the cut. I’d simultaneously managed to piss off both Manchester City fans – who saw me as a City content creator who was turning his back on the club (an issue I was basically made to address in the following episode of a podcast I was presenting at the time, like Bill Clinton ensuring to a nation that he did not have sexual relations with that woman), and also Oldham fans, who were in the mire of their own ownership troubles and didn’t like the idea of anybody giving them money.

So, yes, I’m setting the stall out up front. Does this problem I’m about to write about directly affect me? No. I’m not going to be buying a season ticket no matter what. I’m quite happy with my £286 renewal at Boundary Park, watching Oldham desperately struggle to make the play-offs in the National League, with a manager at the helm that I don’t particularly like, thank you very much.

Manchester City announced their season ticket renewals on Friday evening, with pricing going down like a gold-plated balloon in Sheikh Mansour’s palace. Prices have been increased by £30-35 in most cases, roughly 5% around the ground.

I’ll get the counter argument out of the way – £30 over the course of a season, especially when you’re taking into account the ability to pay for your ticket by Direct Debit over ten months, is not that much. £3 per month is the equivalent of a cup of coffee and a sausage roll on your way to work in the morning one day. However, it’s precisely this kind of thinking which the club banks on engulfing the entire fanbase.

The stealth increases have been slowly implemented over the years. My first purchase, made for the 2015/16 season, was in the Family Stand, Block 134. It cost me £500.

The following season, the club actually did the right thing and froze the season ticket prices (no doubt with very little choice after a season that was genuinely quite embarrassing, with Manuel Pellegrini scraping Champions League qualification on the final day). Pep Guardiola was on his way, all was looking good.

2017 – £515.

2018 – £530.

2019 – £545.

Each year since Pep Guardiola’s arrival, the price has slowly but surely increased. I never really complained much about the price increases as they came for precisely the reason I outlined – it was only costing me an extra £1.50 each month with each season. I’m fortunate enough to be in a job where I get an annual pay rise which more than covers this cost, so whilst it annoyed me I just kind of rolled my eyes and clicked “Renew” each time it came around, like a frog not realising the water was boiling around me and slowly killing me.

Of course, the club do this with one goal in mind – to get Manchester City’s matchday revenue closer to their fellow “big six” rivals. Tottenham Hotspur’s cheapest adult season ticket prices for the 2022/23 season are £807 and the median price is at least £1,000. If you think City’s money men aren’t looking at that pricing and wondering why their star-studded, serial trophy-winning side managed by the greatest manager that’s ever lived is earning matchday revenue which is just barely over half of Spurs’ £106.1 million, you’re ignoring the evidence which has been put in front of us for years.

Manchester City’s matchday revenue in 2016/17 was £51.9 million. In six years of growth (well, more like five, seeing as one year had no season tickets to increase due to covid), it has risen to £54.5 million, about 5%. I don’t know if the tiny increases make it more or less difficult to swallow. I think it’s more difficult knowing that it makes virtually no difference to the club’s bottom line in the big picture.

A season ticket in my old seat in 2016 cost £500, in 2022/23 it costs £560. Sure, the increases at the time are not significant but overall it’s an increase of 12%. Look ahead to the 2023/24 season ticket pricing which has just been announced and it’ll be £590, an 18% increase.

In this time, the club’s commercial income has increased (again, between 2016 and 2022), from £218 million to £309.5 million, an increase of roughly 42%. The club’s broadcasting income has increased from £203.5 million to £249.1 million, an increase of 22%. In fact, the £249.1 million figure of 2022 is actually a decrease on 2021’s figure of £297.5 million. If that figure had maintained, it would be a 46% increase.

Of course, the percentages paint enough of a picture about how much more valuable the increases in commercial and broadcasting revenue are to the club than matchday, but what’s more important than the percentages is the sheer number. A combined commercial/broadcast revenue increase of £137.1 million over the six years dwarfs the £2.6 million increase in matchday revenue and this is where the crux of the problem for fans really lies. Nickel and dime’ing the fans who’ve been following the club for decades doesn’t really materially benefit the club in any real meaningful way.

If we were to be incredibly broad with our maths here (and let’s be honest, the entirety of this is incredibly broad and very back-of-a-fag-packet level maths) and said that the average ticket price increase in 2023/24 is the same 5% my old seat is getting compared to 2022/23, and if we say that the entirety of the matchday revenue is purely ticket sales, that means that the club would increase their current £54.5 million by a meaty £2.75 million. Probably about five to six weeks of Kevin De Bruyne’s wages. Probably a couple of random UAE-based drinks company sponsorships.

However, the reality is that all of the matchday revenue is not covered by purely season ticket prices alone, and it’s telling that despite the rise of 18% on my seat over the years, the matchday revenue has not increased by 18% along with it. This is because matchday revenue covers all facets of the day – drinks, food, programs, merchandise etc. If ticket prices are increasing by minimum 10% over the course of those six years, the fact that the revenue only actually increased by 5% says that those who are attending are cutting their cloth accordingly.

If a day to the game used to cost you £30 for a ticket, you’d probably have another £10-20 to spend in the ground once you got there. Get yourself a drink with your mates, treat yourself to a chicken balti pie and sit back and wait for the light show to begin. However, when matchday tickets are now costing you £45+, and you have to pay for a membership on the website just for the privilege of being able to buy one to begin with, a day out which used to cost you £50 in total now costs you closer to £60 before you’ve even set foot inside the Etihad Stadium concourse. It’s no wonder people are cutting back costs around the ground.

City have still got their obligatory £285 Silver Season Tickets that they hold a certain stock of just so they can take in the headlines of having the cheapest season tickets in the league but it’s a myth. It’s the equivalent of a billionaire giving £1,000 to charity and expecting plaudits from the national media. The “Manchester City have cheapest season tickets in Premier League” headlines do not reflect the reality of the situation, and these aren’t headlines we should take any pride in as fans.

This is the economic reality the club’s fanbase, and the country as a whole, is operating in. We’re in the middle of one of the biggest cost of living crises our generation has known, with energy prices 4-5x, in some places more, the cost they were pre-2022. Food prices are rising, petrol is anywhere from £1.35-1.50 per litre depending on which way the wind’s blowing that day. The entire country is being pushed to its economic limit and not everybody’s in the luxurious position of having been given a pay increase since covid hit, let alone since the economy tanked.

Yet football lives in its own bubble. Whilst the nation’s economy writhes in agony, football (and Manchester City in particular) is recording record revenues and new highs in broadcasting revenue. A new bidding war is probably going to emerge between the likes of Amazon and Apple TV in the next couple of years, there’s talks of the Premier League investigating the idea of setting up their own streaming service where all games would be accessible for a subscription, which would basically print money for the league and therefore the clubs.

English football is crushing the rest of Europe, with the likes of Leicester and Everton, two clubs staring down the barrel of potential relegation, making the Top 20 club revenue list. Football simply does not operate in the same world as the rest of us. The fans might be living on the breadline but football clubs most certainly are not.

City are probably going to spend an exorbitant amount of money on a midfielder this year and I hope to god it’s Jude Bellingham. It probably will be. So just remember, as you grit your teeth and renew your season ticket, your extra £30 is just one of thousands of £30 payments which will help to fund a fraction of Bellingham’s agent’s fee for that deal. Without you, it would truly not be possible.

I can’t help but compare it to the likes of Oldham, who are charging me £286 for my season ticket next year (and I’m obviously not suggesting that City bring their tickets in line with that pricing). What Manchester City earn in dodgy crypto and suspect Far-East betting company sponsorships is the kind of money that keeps a club like Oldham Athletic running for five years. A couple of months ago there were massive celebrations inside Boundary Park because the owner had finally managed to actually bring the stadium under the club’s ownership. That’s the level they’re at. The matchday income is infinitely more important to a club like Oldham than it is to Manchester City, yet they’ve been restrained with ticket prices because they know the simple reality – people can’t afford to pay much more.

There’s also a lot to be said for the good will amongst the fans and the PR it brings with it, and there’s been plenty of that for Oldham’s owners since 2023/24 ticket prices came around. Imagine if City, in the run up to the treble potentially coming to the Etihad, in the run up to a Champions League Semi-Final against Real Madrid (a ticketing issue they also managed to spectacularly fuck up earlier that same day), announced they were freezing season ticket prices? It’s a gesture which would materially cost a club of City’s stature very little but, in the current climate it would be a PR slam dunk.

Let’s be honest, the club would never do that and it’s the same reason they managed to cock up the Real Madrid ticketing also.

The Real Madrid ticketing in the Champions League final did not work in the same way it had in the previous round against Bayern, or most other years in important games. Normally there’s the usual pre-sale for season ticket holders and cup scheme members etc, then the tickets are incrementally opened up to fans who’ve purchased games in previous rounds of the tournament or fans who’ve got more ticket points, to ensure that the loyal fans get first dibs.

Instead, this time round, the usual pre-sale took place for those with season tickets and those on the cup scheme, only to be then opened up to, well, basically everybody. It just went straight on general sale on Friday morning and the long-standing fans who were normally confident of their ability to get a ticket were suddenly finding themselves sitting 20,000th in a queue at 10am. You could have never bought a City ticket in your life and be on an equal footing with somebody who had been to every previous Champions League game, just because they happen to not have a season ticket.

Of course, the club doesn’t really mind that, because everybody who’s never bought a ticket in their life has to sign up to the aforementioned Cityzens membership in order to get one, which sets you back a one-off fee for the year. They were probably quite happy to rake in a couple of thousand extra memberships for the tourists who were looking to get to one of the biggest fixtures in the European football calendar.

And this is what it ultimately comes down to. The club don’t really care who is sat in the seats. Guardiola can praise the fans and gee them up prior to the Arsenal game in the matchday program all he likes, there are plenty of incidents over the years which go to show that Manchester City’s board don’t really have any interest in appeasing the club’s fans. As long as the seats are full, it doesn’t really matter how that happens, and the club is rapidly approaching the point where, no matter what the empty seat counters in Salford will tell you, there are more than enough day-trippers eager to watch Erling Haaland, Kevin De Bruyne and Phil Foden light up a football pitch in your place should you choose to pack it in. They’d probably prefer the foreign tourists to take up the spots because they’ll probably spend £100 in the club shop on the way in.

City’s attitude to negative PR and media scrutiny is simple – let the fans do the defending for them. They don’t concern themselves with getting into any sticky battles when the same journalists who call them state-backed financial dopers sit in press conferences and ask Guardiola what he knows about bungs to Roberto Mancini in 2012. They don’t have to, because there are swarms of fans on Twitter who take hours out of their day to write dozen-long Twitter threads about why X journalist is actually a massive hypocritical poopy head.

We’re all guilty of sitting on Twitter and defending our club against the big bad journalists and pundits we don’t like, bragging about the club’s Net Spend and how their wage bill isn’t even the highest in the league. So if we acknowledge that these things are true, how do we square that with the season ticket increases?

It’s not like the club weren’t aware of what fans would think of any price increase. City Matters, a group which is finally starting to use its platform to call the club out publicly on fan related matters rather than just be a silent observer in the corner of the board meetings to tick a box and provide absolutely nothing to the fanbase which it was put in place to allegedly serve, released a statement calling for a freeze on prices.

A statement which was swiftly ignored.

Maybe, when you’re sat there about to reply to Barney Ronay because he wrote something that you don’t like about your club, ask yourself if Ferran Soriano would do the same thing for you. I know it’s difficult to do this because, for many of us, your football club is second only to your family in terms of emotional attachments you have in your life, so you can’t give it an actual corporate face that you don’t like, but just give it a go. Stop spending your free time defending a business on Twitter that isn’t doing anything to help you in return.

Just stop letting the club take you for a mug. I’m not going to tell anybody not to renew their season ticket, it’s obviously not my place to do so and the reality is that 99% of people who’ve received this increase will just do it anyway for the same perfectly understandable reasons that I did it back when I had one. Just factor that in when you go to games. Have a few pints at a nearby pub instead of the Etihad concourse. Have your tea at home before you go to the ground.

The only way that fans can make their feelings known without going full Blackpool-style boycott (and we all know that won’t work for a club the size of City with a season ticket waiting list in the thousands) is to just bring down that matchday revenue as much as possible in every other facet of the day. You aren’t hurting your club by doing this. You’re making their matchday revenue £56.3 million instead of £57.8 million.

Manchester City don’t live or die by matchday revenue and they would do well to remember it in future.

You can follow Joe Butterfield on Twitter here: @joebutters

Related Topics:

Trending