Ticket prices « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

The price of football.

Arsenal are the most expensive football club in the world to go and watch, it’s a fact!  It’s been on the telly, in all the papers and probably every fan blog/website has had a discussion or comment made about this at some point so it must be true.

Many Arsenal fans will tell you that as they are the ones who pay, they know how much it is and therefore they must know it is more expensive at Arsenal (I’m assuming they have season tickets at several clubs to really know this first hand).  The BBC do their annual report where they only include information that backs up their agenda and like many people say, why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

OK, so let’s be honest.  Going to watch football at Arsenal is not cheap, however nothing is these days.  Gas & Electricity prices are continuously rising at an aggressive rate, petrol has risen dramatically over the years, train travel has sky rocketed, food prices have gone up, clothing….. you get the point.

Like us, football clubs have to pay all of these things so it’s obvious that their sources of money are going to have to increase and that includes the money from you and me!  Further to this, factor in the location aspect and you have some areas of the country costing more than others before you do anything.

I want to take a look at Matchday revenue as this is where the pounds come directly out of our pocket and where we feel and see it most and am going to use a method of comparison which seems to have been avoided by the newspaper journalists, presumably because they are too lazy to do it properly.

Since moving to the new stadium, Arsenal have generated larger proportions of their revenue from the fans on matchday.  The most obvious increment in this coming from the increase in capacity approx of 22,000 people but rising ticket prices have also contributed.  The question is, do Arsenal fans really pay more to Arsenal FC over the course of a season?

The table below shows the annual matchday revenue for Arsenal and average attendance per game.  It also shows the average price paid per fan for the season.

* Attendance figures from soccerstats.com, financial figures from Deloite.

The figures speak for themselves, the cost of going to watch Arsenal has been coming down as opposed to common held belief that we are spending more and more money and this is whilst the cost at other clubs has increased some seasons.  So how do Man Utd, Chelsea and Liverpool fair?  They will all be higher than us right??

Well yes, Man Utd and Liverpool fans do pay less to watch their team but Chelsea fans are paying more than we do yet isn’t it always us who get the criticism.  Liverpool is a substantial amount less owing to several factors (old stadium, geography, no longer top 4 etc…) but Man Utd are only marginally less and by the time you factor in regional price variations you would probably find out you are paying more speaking relatively.

I wanted to have a see how this compares with the cost of living so thought I’d compare the cost of going to watch your team against a cost of a house in the area (I have used average sale prices according to Zoopla).

So what this really shows is, we are not the most expensive team to watch whether you base it on cold hard pounds spent per person per game or if you choose to compare things on a regional basis.  One thing I think would also be safe to assume is that if we had stayed at Highbury, our situation would be like Chelsea and we would be paying more than we do now.