As Europe’s best teams prepare to redraw battle lines in the Champions League this week, there is a growing chasm in the cost of supporting clubs across the continent.
The Premier League, self-styled as the best in the world, perhaps unsurprisingly, remains the least accessible to the ordinary fan, even if it can no longer claim to be the most successful.
As revealed by the BBC earlier this month, the expense of going to watch a football match in England has risen by 13 percent since 2011, almost double the cost of living. In the last year alone prices have leapt 4.4 percent, while inflation in the UK was just 1.2 percent.
That is not to say that the charges to watch Premier League football are extortionately more than on the continent. On the contrary, of teams in the top five leagues in Europe – the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Ligue 1 and Serie A – 15 boast prices bigger than England’s most expensive which is Arsenal at £97 (Dh569).
A ticket to Real’s Clasico victory over Barcelona would have cost Madrid fans as much as €236 (Dh1,085), while the cheapest was €70 (Dh322).
AC Milan offer a ticket at San Siro for a whopping €382 (Dh1,757), while rivals Internazionale – and Torino – sell tickets for €250 and entry to Paris Saint-Germain’s Parc des Prances stadium can set you back up to €221.
But where these clubs differ to their English counterparts is in the price of their cheapest ticket. On average the least expensive ticket in France is just €10.74, in Germany that rises to €15.16, in Italy it is €16.87 and in Spain it is €22. By contrast the average price of the cheapest ticket on offer at Premier League clubs is €36.55.
“I think the difference is there’s a range of prices,” says Andrew Gibney, a French football expert who swapped Celtic Park for Lille’s Stade Pierre-Mauroy four years ago.
“Even for the bigger games, you can get tickets from €15 up to the €120 for VIP. So they’ve got the expensive seats for the people that want to pay that but they’ve got really reasonable prices.”
The best value ticket to be found in the top five leagues is at Guin gamp, where it is possible to watch a Ligue 1 game for as little as €4 (Dh18.62). When you consider the average price of the cheapest admission in England’s League Two is €23.34 (Dh137), it’s easy to see why English fans have started to feel disenfranchised.
“The Premier League has got money coming out of its ears with its various worldwide media rights deals,” says Football Supporters Federation (FSF) chair, Malcolm Clarke.
“If you compare the current TV and media deals that they’ve got in total with the previous deals they had then by our calculation you could let every single spectator into every single Premier League game free and still have the same amount of money that they had before. Which gives an idea of the scale of it.
“For prices to continue to rise above the rate of inflation, in fact for prices to continue to rise at all given the new media deals, for the match-going fan is unacceptable.”
The Premier League is in a unique position from an economic point of view. Attendances have fallen in both Germany and Spain since 2012, yet the English top flight continues to report soaring crowds, with 95 per cent of games sold out last season.
One of the major reasons for Guinthat is the Premier League’s international appeal, but as foreign tourists flock to games the fear is that clubs lose touch with their communities.
Labour have outlined plans to install two fans on every club board should they win the 2015 UK general election, but while stadiums are full, there is little incentive to drop prices, especially when ticket revenue makes up such a large percentage of income for clubs striving to reach the upper echelons of the English game, and the perceived riches that await there.
“I think the problem with English football, or one of the problems, is that as you go down the pyramid everyone is trying to leap into the land of milk and honey above,” Clarke adds.
“Clubs spend in order to try and get the team necessary to get them to the next level, but the lower down you go the higher ticket income is as a proportion as total income. So, you get them charging high prices because that’s the only way they can get the extra income to buy the players to get them into the level up.”
The FSF talk to other fan groups around the continent through Football Supporters Europe, but Clarke says pricing is rarely on the agenda.
That does not mean other countries are not experiencing problems, it is just they are of a different nature. Attendances continue to tumble in La Liga, and outside of the big three of four clubs there is a real battle to entice fans back.
This has led to a fall in ticket prices at some clubs, but a haphazard approach to when matches go on sale, allied with a lack of coherent marketing strategies and a culture adverse to planning too far in advance, mean empty seats remain.
In Italy, although attendances have improved slightly over the past two seasons, prices need to be lower to attract those fans through the turnstiles, who may have been put off by the more unsavoury aspects of Italian football.
Eleven Serie A clubs offer tickets at €15 or less, while Verona have a €0.50 ticket for fans under 14, and Cagliari let in children under eight for just €1. Genoa, meanwhile, offer a season ticket in their family section for just €50.
But that is not to say that affordable pricing has to be borne out of a desire to fill stadia that have become empty – as the Bundesliga continues to highlight.
Like many, Clarke would like to see British football adopt a more German approach, where the 50+1 rule means supporters hold a majority stake in their clubs and costs have remained low.
In contrast to the Premier League, only one Bundesliga side currently charges more than €20 for their cheapest ticket, while on average the most expensive is €59.93. That would only get you into the cheap seats for a category A game at Barcelona’s Nou Camp, while it would not be enough to get you in to see El Clasico.
Reasonable prices have only enhanced the Bundesliga’s reputation as a hotbed for the affordable football experience, and fans flock to the Bundesliga in large numbers.
Nine of the top 20 average attendances in Europe last season were at German clubs, including FC Koln who managed to pull in 46,235 per home game, while playing in the second tier.
It is hard to envisage a time when the Premier League will be so revered for its fan experience, but Clarke is not about to start a walkout. He believes it would ultimately prove futile.
“They’ve got what marketing people would call 100 per cent brand loyalty and they abuse it,” he says. “We could all stop going.
I don’t think we could ever realistically organise that, but we partly say why should we? “Football clubs are part of our cultural heritage and it’s a pretty poor show if the only way you can get change is to stop going.”
