Issue One: Go Compare – Season Ticket Prices

Saturday sees the first edition of The Square Ball magazine go on sale for the new season. You can get hold of a 56-page full-colour copy outside Elland Road at the usual places for a bargain £1.50. It is also available online in digital and paper format for those who can’t make it to the Middlesbrough or Hull matches.

Amongst many of the excellent regular features and various opinion pieces is a couple of articles based on some research undertaken by The Square Ball team. It is often a complaint of the Leeds fans that we are ripped off in terms of season ticket prices. They’ve always felt high for the standard of football we watch but there is rarely anything to give us definitive proof that we are paying more than others. The BBC’s Cost of Football survey last week, for example, was not exactly enlightening and failed to really get to the heart of the real issues that affect football fans. Including Leeds’ Category C price in their research when that price was only available for one Championship match last season seemed to miss the point.

So, to finally get to the bottom of the issue, The Square Ball has produced a spreadsheet of every club’s cheapest and most expensive season ticket price in the top two tiers of English football. That includes adults and juniors, early renewals and new applicants. What you will see in the mag tomorrow and on the blog over the next few days is the culmination of months of hard work. I’ll be honest and say the spreadsheet, while it is interesting to the geeks among us, isn’t exactly something you want to delve into after a few pints and an easy 4-0 win against Middlesbrough (Ok, that’s a bit optimistic). That’s where the excellent The Beaten Generation comes in. TBG has produced a glossy double-page graphic comparing all the ticket prices with some snazzy circle diagram thing (sorry TBG, I’m not doing it justice). Each coloured circle represents the price of a different season ticket at each club. It really is illuminating and gets the message across clearly without boring you to death (I’ll do that in a blog piece next week).

Speaking of boring stuff, I should make a few things clear about the prices though. A strict criteria was used when compiling all the data to get a consistent level across all clubs. This means the prices for the ‘cheapest adult season ticket’ is for those outside family areas. This is because a lot of clubs, like Leeds, don’t allow adults to buy season tickets in their family areas without children. With the ‘most expensive adult season ticket’, they are for non-corporate/hospitality areas. Offers such as ‘two adult, two children’ family value packs were ignored. In the junior categories, the age limit at each club often varies. Many clubs chose to make their junior category Under-16s, others have Under-17s or Under-18s. The graphic does not take this into consideration but one of the articles specifically addresses the issue of junior prices and the variation in age ranges. What you won’t see, for example, is which clubs have brilliant offers such as Under-10s for free or Under-12s for £23. Hopefully that will become clearer on the blog next week.

Finally, while the spreadsheet we ended up with includes both Premier League and Championship prices, we felt it necessary to only compare Championship prices in the magazine. There are a number of reasons for this. While looking at both leagues combined is rather eye-opening, we felt it was best to stick to a comparable ‘product’ (apologies for using that horrible word). A Championship season ticket is for 23 games, whereas a Premier League one is for only 19 (or 26 at Arsenal as theirs include seven cup games as well).  Also, by comparing only Championship clubs, we are sticking to those with the same incomes from the central Football League pot and not the multi-million pound TV deals of the Premier League. That way, we get the fairest comparison possible.

Anyway, enough of the boring stuff. If you do kindly choose to buy a copy of The Square Ball at Elland Road or online, give the season ticket feature a read and let us know what you think on the comments below or the forum. As I mentioned above, more details will come out from the research over the next few days so keep an eye on the blog, Twitter and Facebook for links.