Arsenal Are Robbing Their Fans Blind

After Arsenal drew 2-2 with Hull at the weekend an outsider could be forgiven for thinking their Arsenal supporting friend, relative or acquaintance had just witnessed one of the worst defeats in the history of the mighty Arsenal. It felt like a defeat, such was Arsenal’s dominance of the game. Anyone who tells you anything other than Arsenal were the better team is either a revisionist who probably just wants to use the result to further their own angry agenda or is named Steve Bruce.

The fact that Arsenal dominated possession so much and Hull spent the majority of their time with 11 men behind the ball goes a long way to explaining why this felt like a defeat. We are 8 games in and we are already 11 points off the pace and only have two wins to our name – frankly it’s not good enough. Injuries and poor officiating are of course factors in this but the biggest issue is we are just not at the races at the moment, for whatever reason that may be. I’m still confident we’ll click and be a real force but with every game that passes without a win our chances of even being considered outside challengers dwindles.

Some may feel I am foolish for thinking we could overhaul an 11 point gap and whilst I agree it is ambitious I would say that it has been done before with fewer games to play and fundamentally I am certain we could all stomach missing out on the title as long as we win something else and that gap has been severely reduced by the time the final table is published.

My misery over the “drawfeat” – terrible, I know – was compounded by the outrage on social media over new “reports” about ticket prices. The coverage of this issue made me so angry because of the lies, bias, click-baiting and deliberate misdirection.

Let me preface this rant odyssey I am about to embark upon with my views that ticket prices in the UK are too high. I want to avoid calling them overpriced because if people are willing to pay, however much they remonstrate that they “have no choice”, then technically they are not overpriced. The value of something is, as with players, determined by how much someone is willing to pay for it.

Football supporters in the UK have been squeezed for far too long and something should be done about it. Clubs are quick to say they are increasing commercial revenues to reduce the reliance on matchday income and thus the man in the stand but increases in commercial revenue is often being used to finance the ambitions and demands of the fans on the field rather than their concerns off it, namely ticket prices.

There is a balance to be struck but it is incredibly hard to find as reduced ticket prices and investment in the team are generally mutually exclusive within a non-benefactor operation. It is possible to reduce ticket prices but ultimately it will have an effect on the field as there will be less money available to finance new purchases and pay their wages and indeed the wages of the players we’ll be wanting to keep hold of.

For the sake of argument and to save myself going through the hassle of creating loads of spreadsheets and graphs I’m going to use the matchday revenue as the figure and the reduction I propose will be spread across the average official attendance of 59,487 and break it down into 26 home matches. It’s not perfect but it will highlight the point well enough without being completely off the mark. I’ll also refer to it as the matchday experience cost rather than the tickets.

Naughty Arsenal! How dare you rinse your fans whilst everyone else lets them in for free!

If Arsenal were to cut their matchday prices by 10% it would see their matchday revenue drop by roughly £10m based on the latest income figures. This equates to £168.10 per attendee over the course of the season which when divided by 26 equals £6.46 per game. It’s not a life-changing amount of money to either party however it does mean more to the supporters than it does the club, sometimes up to four games worth of tickets, food and programmes.

To Arsenal, £10m is not an awful lot of money but if they lost that £10m then it would affect the transfer budget. In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t sound like it would make much of a difference but when talking about any football club outside of the dubiously financed you have to remember that a budget is a budget regardless of how much it is. If our budget is reduced by £10m then it could have a real impact on how many players we can bring in. If we have £50m available for transfers every summer and we cut that by £10m then £40m is only really going to buy us one top player every summer and if we need a few signings like Debuchy or Ospina then we could be in trouble.

Now, of course Arsenal would easily absorb this cost and make it work, it’s not like a bit of proper planning won’t see us make the most of our money and see our fans right but it would have to come at the expense of some fan expectations. The supporters would have to make concessions such as accepting the club will have to negotiate harder to get the most out of their budget and risk not signing the player at all. “That’s how it is already!” I hear you cry and you are right but remember that many blame this type of prudence on the man in charge. The next man would have this imposed upon him whereas, as so many believe, the current man has the choice to bid more but chooses not to.

I am not extolling the virtues of Arsenal charging more money or keeping the status quo because I vehemently believe that football should be affordable and accessible to all and much more could be done by our great club to make that a reality.

However it is not just Arsenal who should be making attempts to gift their fans with better deals and more options but if you read mainstream and social media you could be fooled into believing that Arsenal are the only ones “ripping off their fans” and are “everything that is wrong with modern football”.

It is now, over 1000 rambling words later that we get to the crux of this post. I am, at times, apoplectic at how Arsenal are portrayed as the only villains, or at best the chief villains, in a country wide problem.

Saying the media have an agenda against Arsenal is easy in principle but proving it is nigh on impossible because we are looking at the media as an entity, something cohesive, when in fact it is a collection of mutually branded individuals with individual agendas and opinions. However, many individuals within the media have, or seem to have, similar opinions. Whether or not they genuinely believe Arsenal are the sole or main perpetrators of the great fan robbery or they are just click-baiting is hard to prove but it does not diminish the fact that it is done.

For example, last week the “cost of football” once again dominated the sports pages and as usual they lead with how much Arsenal charge, mostly reporting the highest figure despite, if memory serves correctly, the highest season ticket at Arsenal is charged to fewer than 150 people.

The majority of articles on this subject led with Arsenal related facts or an image of Arsenal fans. They are deliberately attempting to forge a conscious and subconscious connection between high prices and Arsenal. And it has worked.

Ask any fan of a UK team, and indeed many Gooners, who has the highest ticket prices and they will mostly say Arsenal. Whilst this may be technically correct it is wrong in so many ways because the “media” has succeeded in making high ticket prices synonymous with the cost of a game.

One Arsenal supporter of over 40 years said on Twitter today they have never paid over £50 to see Arsenal play and last spent £27 watching a Premier League game at the Emirates. This may not be true for the majority of people but I am yet to find a person who consistently pays £100+ to watch Arsenal as some journalists would have you believe.

I moved out of London the year we moved to the Emirates and in the time we have been in our new home I have probably been to around 30 Arsenal matches (not including Emirates Cup which I think is fantastic value for money for someone who until recently has not been close enough to go regularly) and I have not once paid more than £65 with my average ticket cost somewhere around £52.

That isn’t chump change and I certainly couldn’t afford it every week and the equivalent season ticket would be circa £1400 but then I’d be tied to a seat (which I would genuinely love) and I’ve enjoyed experiencing different parts of the stadium.

I am sickened by how often Arsenal are held aloft as the worst of them all when it comes to prices especially when 8 Premier League clubs including newly promoted Burnley have a higher “cheapest day out” cost than us. 8! Burnley!

Not enough is made of our cup credits nor the shortcomings of clubs like United who ban supporters from games who don’t buy certain tickets. When our credits are mentioned they are done so fleetingly and the importance of them is overlooked. It’s easy to paint Arsenal as the villains and not enough is made of the fact on a per match basis Arsenal are cheaper than Chelsea, Liverpool and Spurs. Not enough is made of the fact Arsenal is a London club where the locals, at least officially, have a much higher average salary than clubs like Liverpool and Man City. Or indeed the relative expense of all things when living in the capital.

Our bitter neighbours have season ticket prices almost as high as ours but they don’t include credits like we do nor have they tasted the historical or recent success that we have nor compete regularly in the world’s premier club cup competition as we do yet their prices aren’t scrutinised as much as ours.

It’s always evil Arsenal and few journalists stand up for the truth because it doesn’t get them enough clicks. Recently the BBC published an article concerning Tim Farron MP bemoaning third kits and calling them a rip off and what does the BBC do? Open with an image of Jack Wilshere in the blue PUMA kit and mention Arsenal first using a quote about demand. With 20 clubs to choose from why Arsenal first? Surely Arsenal weren’t the only club they could have asked or got a response from?

No. It was done because Arsenal has wrongly become synonymous with ripping off fans. They are vituperated for their charges to visiting fans yet the same or higher costs for Arsenal fans are swept under the carpet such as Arsenal away supporters paying almost £20 more than their Norwich counterparts last season.

QPR charging the same for Fulham fans as Arsenal charged Liverpool and City fans is ignored. Arsenal versus a title rival compared to QPR vs Fulham. No disrespect to either club but the Emirates is a world-class stadium hosting a match littered with world-class talent between two top clubs and the other is being held between relegation teams who were playing boring football at Loftus Road, which is a dump. A quaint dump with character but a dump nonetheless.

And then you have clubs like Bayern and Barcelona being held aloft as the global standard but you are comparing oranges with apples. The way TV deals and commercial deals are negotiated by these clubs is vastly different from what we are allowed to do in the UK and building a stadium or facilities in Barcelona would be largely paid for by the state which was not the case for Arsenal. Had Islington council paid for our stadium we could reduce prices by 20% and still be throwing notes at world-class players like an investment banker in a strip club.

Also, has anyone ever been able to buy these so called cheap tickets at Bayern and Barca? According to people who have lived in those cities it’s almost impossible to get the prices paraded around by the media as the standard to which all should aspire.

Look at these prices for a Barcelona match!

@DarrenArsenal1 Tickets at Barca for £18? Good luck getting one of those! pic.twitter.com/L4m8tAhL6Q

— Dan Deamer (@dandeamer) October 15, 2014

High prices in football is a disease and more has to be done to make it more affordable but Arsenal aren’t the creators of this disease and certainly aren’t the most advanced carrier or the most contagious.

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