By Walter Broeckx
Let me start by saying that I would love it if the ticket prices at Arsenal would drop. I would be very happy with that. As for most people it is expensive. And as most of Europe is in not the best economical conditions (certainly my country is doing badly we are being told) I think most people do have to look out in a careful way on how to spend their money.
So if Arsenal could drop their prices with 50% I would be in heaven. And probably might come over a few more times in a season. But alas as Arsenal is one of the clubs that have to keep up with the battle with the rich and almighty oilers we will not see such a thing happening. Only if there comes a salary cap, and complete FFP rules we might see it happening. But we all can dream but reality tells us that this will not be happening any time soon.
As we all know in the media Arsenal is the club that they like to bash whenever the ticket price is being mentioned. We have shown on a few occasions that for a season ticket Arsenal is not the costliest team to watch if you look at it per match.
But the media like to hang us out to dry and make it look as if Arsenal is not only out there to rob the poor Arsenal supporters of their money but also is out there to rob those poor visiting supporters of their hard earned money.
We all remember the outrage in media and in referee circles where they portrayed the poor Manchester City fans (oh the irony) who had to pay so much money to see their poor team play at the Emirates. (yes there is some sarcasm in that).
Even referees or at least an assistant told the City players to greet them as they had to pay so much money. Maybe besides letting fouls go it also is now one of the priorities of the PGMO to look at what the visiting supporters have to pay to watch their team play? Well if that is the case we might have some good news from the referee front in the future.
Thanks to one of our readers we have a bit of comparative material on what Arsenal supporters have to pay at away grounds and what the fans from those clubs have to pay when they come to the Emirates.
And what do we see? Well that at 14 grounds Arsenal supporters have to pay more money than when the supporters of those 14 teams come to Arsenal. And we have to remind you that at Arsenal the visiting supporters have a perfect view of the pitch. And that isn’t always the case in each ground where Arsenal supporters have to sit.
We now will show the full table of those 14 clubs. See you at the bottom of this table.
So these are the 14 clubs where Arsenal supporters have to pay more than where visiting supporters have to pay when they come to Arsenal.
In some cases there Arsenal supporters have almost pay the double than visiting fans at the Emirates. That is the case at Hull. At Newcastle it is almost 70% more than they have to pay at Arsenal.
And at Southampton they also charge Arsenal supporters 62% more than they have to pay at Arsenal.
Of course sometimes the difference is rather small. West Bromwich Albion only charging 7% more than their supporters pay at the Emirates. And a few other teams also with a small difference are Stoke, Crystal Palace, Everton and Aston Villa.
Of course this isn’t mentioned in the media. They rather repeat the same old story about how Arsenal is asking too much money at the Emirates. Both for the home and away supporters. And yet 14 of the teams charge more when Arsenal come to their ground.
And then I know from people who went to some of those grounds that the seats are awful and that on more than one occasion you don’t even see the whole pitch at some grounds. Something that is impossible at Arsenal. The only way you don’t see the whole pitch at Arsenal is because of you looking the wrong way. Or other visiting fans setting off flares and smoke bombs. Indeed it was one of the demands that Arsenal had when building the new stadium that every seat should have unrestricted view of the pitch. And having sat in almost every part of the stadium I can confirm that this is the case.
But the media will not mention this of course as it doesn’t fit with the image they have created and will create again next year when they will examine ticket prices. Luckily our readers are sharper than most journalists so we can at least show that it’s not just Arsenal who are asking high prices for tickets to visiting supporters.
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The books
- Woolwich Arsenal: The club that changed football – Arsenal’s early years
- Making the Arsenal – how the modern Arsenal was born in 1910
- The Crowd at Woolwich Arsenal
“But alas as Arsenal is one of the clubs that have to keep up with the battle with the rich and almighty oilers……..”
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They might be battling them for income, but certainly not for expenditure or ambition.
What is the difference at the other clubs? ie ManU/City/Lpool/Everton/Spurs/Chavs/Sunderland?
Ian Henry, one club you ask for is mentioned in this list….
good grief Walter it’s like some strange Illness you have about how down trodden Arsenal are compared to others which is fine as long as you compare like for like – when what you have done is compare all the B category teams coming to our ground with Arsenal an A category team going to theirs – So walter how much do the top 4 A category teams and the spuds pay when they come to the space bowl ?
That said the whole match pricing structure in the prem is a rip off and exists because those at the front end have their noses in the trough and don’t care about you or I .
If a ticket for Toon fans is £36.50 at the Ems – which it is
And we pay £44 for a high altitude seat in that god forsaken bleak Northeastern hole
The differential is +22% (isn’t it ?)
Or even 21% (ahem)
Good piece – sorry to be a pain
Let me start by saying that I would love it if Arsenal combined proper results with their beautiful football.
It tells a lot when even Untold has no way but to change the subject.
If I ever lose my faith…
This is a bit of a weird article…. A slightly odd but welcome distraction from the annual winter crisis!
Roll on January and a month or arse clenching and teeth gnashing waiting for shiny new players…
Dex, did u say shiny new players? Dream on I say, dream on.
yes where are the days we brought in new players. We should have bought players this summer. I heard Alexis was for sale. Debuchy. Chambers. Welbeck. Come one surely we should have bought one of them…
Looks like my sarcasm was lost in transit… Or I missed the target…
Bit like the players Saturday night…
@4evered
The ‘space bowl’? You are giving yourself away, sir. No Arsenal fan would say such disparaging things about our home grounds.
And this doesn’t even mention the fact that train transport, when available, is more expensive from London- provinces return than the other way round……
Walter my season tickets ( 2 ) have gone up over £600 in 7 seasons , it’s virtually impossible to get away tickets as there all sold out , my question is why did we need an increase last season it was so not needed
@Brickfields (or others from Malaysia)
Not wanted to start anything. But are kwek-kwek and tokneneng spelled correctly? No diacritical marks missing? Are there better ways to spell these 2 egg based foods?
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I’m still bummed about losing on the weekend. Hopefully Untold wasn’t slow today, but wordpress was getting attacked starting last night (or probably was).
Here’s hoping for the best Wednesday.
COYG!
GoingGoingGooner:
The stadium was poorly designed. Might be well built but many old supporters who were brought up with the club have been priced out for new fans who have a different understanding of the game & what the want from it. By having club level & boxes all around it separates the top & bottom tiers which is not good for atmosphere like they have at Wembley & Cardiff.
Currently the atmosphere is poor. Reflects the team & current mood.
Freddie Jeeves
November 24, 2014 at 11:40 pm
GoingGoingGooner:
Spot on FJ as one of the old school from Highbury I could never sell out the real home of Arsenal for the space bowl and it’s “customers” Going Going Goner and his selfie snapping pals are welcome to it and their cult leader .
Not only do we seem to have an excess population of AAA posting here, but Usmanov is being quoted in the news again.
If Arsenal players take N shots on net, and score 0 goals, it is not Wenger’s fault.
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Looking for positive Arsenal articles at Google isn’t netting much.
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A couple (3? 5?) years ago, a person started to see headlines of “N things we learned about blah blah blah”.
The problem is, none of these articles are about learning. Or, at least not in the sense the articles are suggesting.
Some people have heard of a weather rock (pole, stick, string, …). If you look at the pole and it appears wet, you can probably infer that it is raining. Or rather, that it has been raining and may still be raining.
In general, a football game is just a single observation, and as the standard deviation is divided by 1 less
than the number of occurences, we end up dividing by 0, which leaves an undefined answer. If you watched a game and you think you LEARNED that one team lost, you are wrong. You didn’t LEARN that, you OBSERVED that. With learning, there is a reason behind WHY something happened. With OBSERVING, there are competing reasons connected by probabilities, and it is likely there is no opportunity to LEARN. Observing some process many times, can allow one to learn. But unfortunately, football games are only played once.
We can’t LEARN anything from the result. Can we learn something from some incident in the game? Maybe.
A free kick (or penalty shot) is a fairly simple incident, which should be easier to LEARN from. We’ll consider a free kick close to the opposition goal, or a penalty shot (almost the same thing).
It is common for players of a team to not practice on their home field. But it is advantageous for players if they would be allowed to do so. And so what typically happens, is that the practice field is set up to resemble the home field very closely. The Emirates stadium has plastic fibres in the turf, and so one expects London Colney to have the same amount of plastic threads. The two fields should have the same clay/silt/sand/gravel composition, they should be watered on the same schedule, when the fields are cut the grass lengths before and after cutting should be close to the same, and a bunch of other details.
Free kicks are something that players should practice. It is up to the defending goaltender to specify how many players to place in a wall, but in general the idea is to disallow all straight shots from getting on target. And in the EPL, I would expect all goaltenders to call for the same wall in (nearly) all situations. As the kicker approaches the ball to kick it, all players should slightly jump, and when off the ground keep their legs straight and the same distance apart, with their toes pointed down. They are looking to jump a distance such that the bottom of each person’s foot in the wall, is probably about 63 to 75% of the height of the ball. Which makes it unlikely that the ball can get under the wall, or over the wall and still be on target.
We still haven’t learned anything from the game, this is still the preparations for a free kick (with a wall) that happens many times in practice.
All players learn a run up appropriate for themselves. Best example I know of, is gridiron place kickers preparing to kick a field goal. They all travel backwards along the line between where the ball is to be set and the center of the goal posts a set distance, and then they move perpendicular to that a specific distance. But the same thing should be happening on free kicks where there is a reasonable chance of scoring directly from the kick.
The direct shot is blocked, the opportunity to score comes from kicking the ball off target with a spin designed to curl the ball on target.
Not all players learn how to curl a ball, and they all differ in how much they can curl it to left or right, or up/down. And the object of scoring from such a free kick is not to curl it the maximum you can, but rather to curl it just enough to get within the boundaries of the goalposts and the bar. Consequently, each player needs to know how to adjust things to apply 80% (or whatever) curvature to the ball. The physics is complicated, and none of these players are physicists.
You want learning? Where they start their run, should change with conditions. (The gridiron place kickers are all kicking from the same kind of astroturf which has friction characteristics largely independent of weather.) How much sprint effort they put into the start has to change. Are there winds along the path or perpendicular to the path?
The local winds, especially with respect to turbulence are difficult to replicate at a training facility compared to the home field.
The above are the considerations to practice free kicks at the home field. To take a free kick away (the opposition field), the ground is of different “strength”, the length of the grass may be different, the type of grass can be different, the groundskeeper may water (or not water) the grass immediately before the game (or at half time?). Local turbulence will be largely unknown.
If thunderstorms are close in an outdoor stadium, downwards microbursts are possible.
Players are capable of learning how to anticipate turbulence at a place where they have the opportunity to do many free kicks in practice. This doesn’t happen at strange locations.
With all that as a too long introduction, in observing a game a person can learn something about how players on the home team take free kicks. They cannot learn anywhere near as much about how the visiting players take free kicks.
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My best advice? If you see an article about what the author learned (suggesting you learned) about any game, don’t even read it. It isn’t even worth the ink it is (or could be) printed on.
There may be things to learn about games by watching them. The learning is difficult, and may take many repeats to catch.
I really doubt journalists know how to spell learn.
Yes, we did purchase all these very nice players no doubt. But what was really really needed, desperately? Did we mange to get cover for that? Inspite of AW saying that’s the priority. We can see the effects of that now. Its all very nice to have a Ferrari (if u can afford it) but what was needed was a land rover.
I have a question for all the AAA’s out there. If Wenger spent like you wanted him to, the players failed and we almost went bust because unlike Chelsea and Man City, our funds are finite, would you be happy then?
Yes Will, They would.
Because we would maybe have won some trawfies along the way. Like Portsmouth did. Like Birmingham did. Where are they now… Oh that’s right we are the ones in a mess… forget them…
I think the answer is simple, offer away fans tickets at prices that are the same as they charge us. And in the same proportion. Sell any remaining seats to Arsenal fans at the same price. If (for example) a north west side does doesn’t fill its allocation then we have more space for Gooners
Freddie – don’t know where you sit mate but most of the time the atmosphere in the North bank is fine thanks, dont recall the West or East stands at Highbury being that noisy tbh, it was always us and the Clock that made the atmosphere
When the media talk about average ticket prices they include Club Level. This is never mentioned. They also do not compare with what cup games are included. In other words, ticket price comparisons are not Like for Like.
The above article concentrates on what away fans pay. A proper analysis would be compatible prices for ST and what is included.
The cost of watching football is too high. More on that subject below.
About our tickets: Our season ticket includes 6 cup games on top of the 19 league games, so 25 games in all. Match day tickets at the Emirates are around £26.00 but £40 or £50 elsewhere and £50.00 at Chelsea. Compared to most teams, as fans we get to see Champions League Football every year. As frustrating as it is at the moment, in the pre-wenger days we were paying to see mid table finishes in an uncomfortable stadium with less than perfect views. But it was much more affordable, granted. I loved those days and I loved Highbury but not all of the football and all of the seasons. We have moved to an amazing stadium, which cost us a lot of money – without any grants or handouts. We didnt have a rich oligarch pumping money into the club, so we have to acknowledge that the club has to generate its own money and perhaps that is where some of the angst comes. Had we had a rich oligarch we would have been competiting with Chelsea and Man City – maybe. Perhaps season tickets will have been subsidised, as they are at Man City (Who virtually had a stadium given to them).
Personally, I think the price of tickets is a joke. Football has become an elitist sport that makes it difficult for ‘families’ to attend. The fault of this does not lie at Arsenals door. The main culprits are the rich oilgarch owned clubs and those financed by ‘other questionable’ means, who have been inflating transfer fees and wages for a very long time. Despite all the money that comes into the game through sponsorship and the TV companies, large chunks get filtered into the players pockets to make them even richer. An average player earning £50K per week is receiving £6 milion per year in wages alone. £100k per week is £12 million and that is without factoring in the repayment of transfer fees over the contract period. So a £30 million player amortilised over 3 years is costing an additional £10 million per year on top of the £12 million wages. Now you may be able to recoup some of that fee by re-selling the player but nevertheless it’s a risky old business and a bloody expensive one.
Perhaps the media and fans should protest about these inflated wages instead of the price of a season ticket. Wages are out of control and player loyalty is diminishing. No coincidence. I think the wages issue has to be addressed, it is ridiculous and unsustainable.
PS: While we have tens of thousands on the season ticket waiting list and demand out weighs availability, nothing is going to change.
proudkev
November 25, 2014 at 9:51 am
The cost of watching football is too high. More on that subject below.
About our tickets: Our season ticket includes 6 cup games on top of the 19 league games, so 25 games in all. Match day tickets at the Emirates are around £26.00 but £40 or £50
NOT CORRECT
2014-15 Matchday Prices – Members
Cat A Cat B Cat C
Upper Tier
Centre Upper Back £95.50 £55.50 £38.50
Next to Centre Upper £95.50 £55.50 £38.50
Next to Centre Upper Back £84 £49.50 £34.50
Wing Upper £84 £49.50 £34.50
Wing Upper Back £74.50 £43 £30.50
Corner Upper £84 £49.50 £34.50
Goal Upper £90 £52.50 £36.50
Goal Upper Back £74.50 £43 £30.50
Lower Tier
Centre Lower £70.50 £40 £28.50
Wing Lower £64 £36.50 £26
Corner Lower £64 £36.50 £26
Goal Lower £64 £36.50 £26
Family Enclosure – Lower Tier
Adult £64 £36.50 £26
Senior Citizen / Cannon Club £27.25 £16 £11.25
Junior Gunner £24 £10 £10
Family Enclosure – Upper Tier
Adult £84 £49.50 £34.50
Senior Citizen / Cannon Club £36.50 £21.50 £15
Junior Gunner £32.50 £19.50 £13.75
4evered: when what you have done is compare all the B category teams coming to our ground with Arsenal an A category team going to theirs
Your logic is sound, but you need to follow it through.
Surely for our supporters those away matches are B category games?
On the reverse, playing at Emirates should be an A category game for them.
So those away supports get an A category away game for cheaper than Arsenal fans get a B category away game?
What was your point again?
Still to many AAA posting here.
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Just up in the news (Google News), is that Sony has now said that it will not renew its contracts with FIFA. So, that is Emirates Airlines and Sony that FIFA has lost due to corruption.
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I read the handful of news articles that talked about Webb “explaining” oficiating decisions in the EPL, and Webb is still being far too selective, glossing over details, and bring up statistics that are unrelealistic. It was kind of funny to see Poll disagreeing with Webb.
Someone’s arithmetic is way, way out!
£50,000 per week z 52.18 weeks based on a 4-years contract = £2.7 millions rounded per annum.
£100,000 per week is double that, per annum.
Contracts for the younger players will be for 4 or 5 years.
Easy come, easy goes?
I’m with Gord………….far, far too many AAA’s. Anybody would think they’d like to see the club fail! Believe me, if the season finished W37 D1 L0, there are people who sit near me who’d want Wenger sacked because of the draw. Personally, I like to “support” the club because it’s detrimental to destabilise it and serves no useful purpose. It’s bad enough that we have the media conspiring against the club without our own (so-called) supporters doing it.
And NO, I don’t believe Wenger is infallible before people come on and start insulting me……..