Darren is a director at The Fan  Experience Company.

He has a background in working on customer service excellence projects in the UK and Europe, and an MBA that included studying in the United States. 

A UEFA Mentor and fan experience and engagement consultant, Darren works with associations, league and clubs across Europe to improve the match-day experience and increase attendance through engagement with fans. He assessed games at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. 

I was in Cyprus, waiting to do a presentation on fan engagement and experience to a bunch of sports clubs and professionals. Before my slot, and the coffee break, they had a guy from an MLS club. He spoke for about 15 minutes on some of the things they were doing with fans. It was really interesting.

Suddenly, he moved onto the topic of pricing. Messi would soon be coming to town with his Inter Miami teammates. The club – I’ll leave their name out – were going to put the ticket price up to $199 for this one game (the usual cost for an adult one was $30) and the guy said it loudly and proudly. There was a bit of an intake of breath, and the temperature seemed to fall a few degrees.

Now, I think the guy was expecting a more positive reaction. This was a good thing, right? His club were cashing in big time, and revenue for the game was going through the roof. It was a form of dynamic (also known as surge and demand) pricing – market forces and the desire for tickets was driving the figures – and a subject that’s reared its head in the last week or so much closer to home.

But we’ll come back to that.

Half The World Away

At the Cypriot conference the reaction throughout the lecture theatre was similar to mine. It was not positive. Where the US-based guy saw dollars and a large revenue boost, I – and many in the room – saw honest, working-class fans being priced out of their clubs biggest game of the season. They either had to pay through the nose, or miss out to what effectively amounts to football tourists; going to the game not to support a club but see one of the world’s best players.

I put a blog out at the time, not just on the apparent unfairness of this for the regular fans, but about the potential for disaster. After all, what if a footballer in his mid-to-late thirties was injured and unable to play? GOAT or not, he’s not immune to missing games and this seemed like a minefield for clubs, even if you overlook the crass way it treats the fans who go to all their games. But I also put it down at the time to being an American thing, not something you'd necessarily see this side of the Atlantic. 

Put Yer Money Where Yer Mouth Is

When Oasis announced a comeback tour last week, dynamic pricing was seen in action as ticket priced soared during the clamour to get hold of them. Fans found it hard to get the tickets anyway given how many people were trying, but some ended up paying over £350 for a ticket originally advertised for £148.50. It even prompted the UK government and consumer watchdog Which? to get involved, with the latter stating that fans who paid more should get the difference refunded. This issue was caused by dynamic pricing, where the prices fluctuate (in reality, go up) if demand is high.

Part of the issue was transparency. Which? asked the fans if they’d been warned of the potential rises, and asked them to submit photographic evidence. Instead, they saw evidence that fans were given a price for tickets, then saw that figure swapped for an unexpected and much higher price (in at least one instance to £377.50) at the last second. Dynamic indeed.

Oasis, and Ticketmaster, denied any involvement. Apparently, it’s the event organiser who sets it up this way. They do have a choice though. Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran refused to add a dynamic pricing model to their world tour tickets, setting a higher face-value price instead to increase profit, but protecting fans from sudden and steep surges. These mega-concerts make upwards of £0.75bn, by the way, so everyone – other than the fans – does pretty well out of them financially.

Of course, dynamic pricing is nothing new. Ticketmaster introduced it in 2018, and things like airline tickets have long been sold this way. If you look for a flight to New York for the half-term holidays, for example, you’ll pay a hell of lot more – two or three times as much - than if you search for the same flights at a different time, say when kids are in school. And for years, real fans have bemoaned that fact that big event tickets (sports, concerts etc) have been bulk-purchased by third parties who then sell them on at a vastly inflated price and make huge profits while fans have to take it on the chin.

It's new to football clubs though. A few outliers have dabbled with it, but it’s not been a mainstream thing…yet, although that might change. La Liga’s Valencia were one of two European clubs to announce they are going to use dynamic pricing.  And while the Premier League have a rule that forces clubs to display ticket prices at the beginning of each season – effectively outlawing the practice - some experts warned that any attempt to change this would result in a backlash similar to the one that killed the European Super League in its infancy during the pandemic.

Villa in Europe

That didn’t stop Aston Villa putting up prices for Champions League games to an eyebrow-raising level when Bayern, Juventus and Celtic came out of the hat in the new style draw. A £55 Category A ticket for a PL game will cost £85 for the European competition – a 55% increase. The fan’s groups called the club ‘out of touch’; compared with other PL clubs and also UEFA’s cap that limits the cost of away tickets to 60 Euros. For the record, Villa defended the increases as effectively the price of success and their way of staying competitive. This was their first excursion in UEFA’s top competition since 1983 (put Villa in Europe into Google and see what I mean). The Football Supporters Association (FSA) response was “Just because you could doesn’t mean you should. We would like clubs to respect the loyalty of supporters. If your club tries to exploit you, how does that make you feel? Clubs need to think about the long game.” Such as a season when they don’t qualify for the Champions League, perhaps?

And remember, we’re still feeling the effects of a cost-of-living crisis, so these price hikes are in that context. The majority of fans have less disposable income, yet football’s ability to wring every last penny out them – the loyal ones especially – remains undimmed.

While Villa’s defence at least made a decent argument, the Valencia one was downright bizarre. No price of success or competitive edge here, it was purely down to fairness.

It wasn’t fair, the club said, that someone who’d planned ahead should pay as much as someone who left it to the last minute. No, they really did say that.

So, a hard-working fan on a low income who goes to every game and has to contend with day and time changes to fixtures – as well as having to wait to know if they can even afford to go - has to pay more than someone who doesn’t even follow Spanish football but who is going to Spain for a long weekend and wants to fit a game in? Libertad VCF – the Valencia fans group - put it much better than I could when they retorted:

"What is not fair is that a fan, who loves his club, who went to the Mestalla for the first time when taken as a child by their father, who stuck by their club when it went down to the second division, is treated as a mere 'spectator'. The fans are not just customers - they are the ones who created the club, who have followed it throughout its history, and are the most important element of a club. Maybe that doesn't show in the financial accounts, but clubs without fans are nothing."

But whether it’s blatant, like Valencia, or more subtle, as Villa have been, it seems that a form of dynamic pricing is encroaching into the once-beautiful game. And where does it end? Will fans end up hoping their teams aren’t too successful in case they are priced out of their biggest games?

And what happens, for example, if Villa – who were in the Championship as recently as 2019 - qualify and eventually play Real Madrid in the semi-finals? Will their fans be asked to stump up over well £100 for the privilege? While Real fans – protected by UEFA’s cap - will pay just over fifty quid?

As it happens, Villa’s club motto is ‘Prepared’.

Sounds like their fans just might need to be.

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