PRICED OUT #1: how Premier League tickets outstripped inflation by 7x

The hidden and not-so-hidden costs that have set fans against owners in a battle for the soul of the world's most popular league

Over the course of this week, Sporting Intelligence will be taking a deep dive into football’s hyper inflation in ticket pricing. And this is how I’ll be working on Substack from this point: shorter weekly pieces that will be free for all readers, and a major monthly investigative series that will be for paid subscribers only.

Today we begin with an overview of how much tickets have rocketed since the Premier League began. That said, attendances in recent seasons have been at all-time record levels. The product is alluring. Clubs can point to demand outstripping supply. I’ve worked on this piece with Martin Cloake, who has his own Substack at The Football Fan.

On Wednesday we’ll consider precisely how much clubs make in revenue per fan per game, and how that has changed over three decades. That piece will also show how ticket revenues have become a minor part of overall income, and detail how much of an average weekly wage you needed to spend on a match in the early 1990s, and how that compares to today.

You’ll get a set of data - as in the graphic below - for each of the 10 clubs who have spent the most years in the Premier League. The data speaks for itself but in 1991-92 Tottenham made 52.8% of their total income from match days, principally ticketing. That was down to 21.4% last season.

Average revenue per fan per game at Spurs in 1991-92 was £10.02 and last season that was up to £80.39. If that number had risen in line with inflation (as per the Bank of England’s ‘basket of goods’ calculator) it would have been £20.30. The actual rise is almost seven times steeper than inflation.

On average, fans in 1991-92 spent just 2.95% of an average worker’s week’s pay to go to a match. That was up to 11.79% last season.

We’ll also be exploring on Wednesday how most clubs now have an enormous gulf between their cheapest season tickets and the five-star, wining-and-dining experience in the top-end corporate seats.

In the third part of this investigation, on Friday, we’ll look at what proportion of each Premier League stadium’s capacity was sold as season tickets in the season just finished - and how markedly that varies between clubs, and why.

1992: £7 to watch Liverpool on The Kop

In 1991-92, the season before England’s top football division was revamped as the Premier League, an ordinary one-off match ticket cost you £17 at Tottenham Hotspur, £11 at Manchester City, and just £7 at Liverpool and Manchester United.