At some point during the coming season the club are going to inflict a new 'Dynamic Ticket Pricing Solution' onto us. This is the latest daft idea to infest English football and it’s the same confusing and inconvenient ticket pricing system beloved of the train companies and budget airlines.
At the start of today’s piece on the official site about next season’s ticket prices it was all good news.
Matchday ticket prices have been frozen for the 2013/14 Championship season, and concessionary prices will be available in all areas of the stadium. But a little further down the page came the sting in the tail.
“The club is seeking to implement a new 'Dynamic Ticket Pricing Solution' part way into the season, subject to approval from the Football League and our fellow Championship clubs. The new scheme is demand-based, and has already been adopted by a number of clubs in both the Championship and Premier League. The club are currently working with our ticketing partners on the launch, and fans will be kept informed of the progress.”
Forgive me for asking, but if you’re calling this a ‘solution’, what exactly is the problem you are trying to solve? What exactly is wrong with the traditional way of charging fans the same price when they are watching the same match from the same section of the stadium?
David Haigh said that “we believe it's a system that will reward fans who buy their tickets early”, but so what? Why should you have to pay a higher price for buying a ticket later on? It’s not as if the rate of inflation in this country is currently so large that a delay of a week or so can justify charging you a couple of extra quid for a ticket.
Due to personal circumstances fans will often have perfectly good reasons for not knowing several weeks in advance whether they can get to a game or not, and at such times we will be penalised by this scheme. I’m sure that some who aren’t able to buy tickets well in advance will refuse to pay the higher price on principle and end up missing the game after all.
The scheme will mean that as making plans for the day of the match itself we will now have to take the trouble to find out when tickets are released for sale, instead of being able to make the purchase at the time that best suits ourselves. The cheap tickets will be limited in number and for the big games they will be snapped up quickly, which will penalise those whose jobs mean they can’t log on to the site the moment they go on sale in the middle of the working day.
Whilst it’s true that clubs such as Derby County have are already inflicting this system on their fans, that is no reason for Leeds United to do the same to us. The official site says that “The new pricing structure further enhances the fact that buying a Season Ticket remains the best value for money" and that’s perfectly true, but only by making some of the matchday tickets rather poor value for money!
Let’s be clear, whenever this system is introduced it is always designed to benefit the party selling the tickets, be they a railway company, an airline or football club, by helping them maximise their revenue. It’s not for the benefit of customers/consumers/supporters, who find cheap tickets difficult and inconvenient to obtain, and limited in number.
Are GFH introducing this system because they so hard up for cash? I suppose we can be thankful that they’re not going to pinch another of Ryanair’s ideas and charge fans £1 for going to the toilet. Or are they?