PRICED OUT #3: The season ticket league table
In the final part of our series on hyper-inflation in Premier League ticketing, we reveal a surprising variance in clubs' policies around a cornerstone of fan culture
West Ham sold a higher proportion of their stadium capacity as season tickets in the 2023-24 season (88%) than any other club in the Premier League.
And in the season before - 2022-23 - the latest season for which full financial records are available, the Hammers’ income on match days, per fan, per game, was among the lowest in England’s top division, at £26.91.
These facts both point to West Ham being a club that take pricing, and fans’ concerns about pricing, seriously. And yet, as at most football clubs, there remain a large number of supporters who feel they are being exploited or ripped off. In West Ham’s case, a plan to phase out concessionary tickets has also caused recent ire.
As Sporting Intelligence has explored in this week’s three-part investigation, Premier League tickets have seen hyper-inflationary price increases since the revamped league began in the early 90s.
This has been particularly true among the Big 6 clubs, as detailed in Wednesday’s piece. But as outlined in Monday’s article, attendances have been at an all-time high in recent seasons. The Premier League product is best in class. Demand is huge. And to conclude “tickets are too expensive” is frankly too simplistic. It’s also paradoxical.
Returning to West Ham, the current boast on their website (below), that they are “home of one of the cheapest Season Tickets in the Premier League” is both true and slightly hollow.
It’s true that an under-18 season ticket for 2024-25 is fabulous value at £109. That works out at £5.74 per Premier League match, or about two quid cheaper than a Big Mac meal, and more than a pound cheaper than most pints in The Cow, one of the closest pubs to West Ham’s stadium.
By the same token, all season tickets for all ages in the 1966 West section of the Billy Bonds Stand will cost £1,720 next season, or £90.53 per game. You do get a free programme with that. And a single admission ticket for the same section does cost £120.
The point of all this? That ticket pricing is complex, controversial and evolving. And in this final piece in this series, we are going to break down how each of the 20 clubs in the Premier League season just finished allocated season tickets as a percentage of their stadium capacity, and how their price structures varied.
To start, a table summarising those findings. We asked all 20 clubs to tell us:
Their official capacity
The number of seats sold as season tickets
The price point of their most commonly-held season ticket
Information about waiting lists and membership schemes
Most but not all clubs responded, with a varying level of detail. Where the clubs did not provide information, we made every effort to find the data by alternative means, including via fan groups and supporters’ trusts. Let’s see what that data tells us.