Chelsea tickets: Stamford Bridge Rip Off
With the 2015/16 season barely underway one thing that is firmly beginning to crystallise is something has to be done about the increasingly exorbitant cost of Premier League away ticket prices. That means all club’s away prices, including Aston Villa’s.
If you want yet another example as an Aston Villa supporter of how ridiculous things have got, just check out the £55 you are expected to fork out if you want to see Villa play Chelsea at Stamford Bridge.
£55 is nothing less than joke price for a league football match. That’s more than some Villa fans paid for their FA Cup semi-final and final tickets at Wembley.
Do Chelsea really need to fleece a few thousand away fans this way? And are Aston Villa happy to just let it happen?
UPDATE: Aston Villa will subsidise tickets by £5 as part of Aston Villa’s Away Match Initiative for the 2015-2016 Season
We already reported how Liverpool away ticket prices penalise teenagers turning from 16-years-old to 17. At least one small blessing is a 17-year-old Villa fan can pick up a Chelsea ticket for £23.50, but that’s still pricey for a concession ticket.
The revenue of gate receipts is increasingly negligible to clubs in the context of the money they reap through TV rights deals. The cliché of fans paying the players’ wages is long gone. The Premier League could make all tickets free and clubs would be not worse off than they were a couple of seasons ago, such has been the hike in TV revenue, and next season the increase will be even more.
Away Ticket Price Extortion
That just shows you the greed that mainlines through the game, as supporters, the original heartbeat of the sport are increasingly overlooked and dismissed. People who equate ticket prices to simple ‘demand and supply’ will soon see such capitalist thinking erode away all that was good about the game.
Already with so much money in the game, it has become it corporatised to such an extent that the resulting institutionalisation has made the English game a soulless laughing-stock to football fans abroad.
But English football fans have let it happen, by not standing up to the business men running the game. There needs to be more pressure.
Take the Twenty’s Plenty campaign to make all Premier League away tickets £20 each.
All Premier League clubs this summer received a bonus payment of £1.2m due to Norwich City not qualifying for a parachute payment since they were instantly promoted. That amount would cover subsidising all away tickets to £20. It’s not pie in the sky either, Swansea City have this season subsidised away tickets to £22 for every away game for Swans fans.
If you agree, that this money should be put towards levelling off all away ticket prices to £20, please vote so in the below poll.
£55 is nothing less than joke price for a league football match.
Going back to the Chelsea £55 ticket price, you are encouraged to boycott the game. Keep the £100+ it would cost you to go the game and don’t put it in the bank accounts of a company that doesn’t really care about you. There has to come a point when you think ‘enough is enough’ and make a stand.
Be a proper football supporter and not a consumer who just haplessly spends their money without realising the consequences. Help bring change.
UTV
I remember going to Chelsea when they were e building the shed. Must be nearly 20 years ago. The price was £45 if I remember rightly for my 14 year old son too. We’ll you go to London as I am tomorrow and you expect t to be ripped off.
I am sick of these prices, I go to 95% of away games with my boys and have done for the past 5 seasons. Chelsea would cost £102.00 for tickets alone, once the train fares and food/drink are taken into account the day would cost in the region of £200.00. I have already decided to boycott Chelsea this season even though it very hard to do. I am seriously considering boycotting all matches where the main ticket price is more than £30.00. The fans are the beating heart of the clubs, without us they have nothing. It is time for the clubs to start treating us in a different manner, we don’t have a bottomless pit of disposable income. Unless there is a change of attitude the working man will be lost from the game forever and match day will become boring and lifeless.