For the past few months, Aston Villa Football Club has been prepping for the Champions League.
Villa is an institution in the English Midlands. Like many institutions, it has spent the past few decades in reputational free fall. This appearance in Europe’s top competition was a celebratory renaissance for the club and its fans. Then they announced the ticket prices.
The expensive seats stayed about the same – £97 ($173). But the cheap seats jumped nearly 60 per cent to £85 ($151).
Villa fans went bonkers. Every media outlet in Britain reported on the story. The club was forced to come out and do a sorry-not-sorry routine.
All the L’il Club That Could vibes bled out of the story. Villa was Manchester United without the trophies.
The tickets were sold, but British soccer was once again put on notice: if you want to gouge broadcasters, fine. But when you gouge your fans, there will be a PR cost.
Contrast that with the news out of Utah last week.
The Arizona Coyotes just moved there. Salt Lake City offered them an arena completely unsuitable for hockey and plenty of local rubes with pants aflame because they have so much money rubbing around in there.
The best seats to see this crummy team top out at US$290 ($393) a game. And that’s if you buy all 41 of them.
It’s not my place to tell people how to spend what they’ve earned. But if your goal is to blow the cost of a used Honda watching professional hockey, then rent a jet and fly to Fort Lauderdale. You’ll save yourself a little money and a lot of disappointment.
Utah’s ticket prices – roughly doubling what Arizona charged to watch the same team – were not a story. What did become a story was the popcorn.
This year, a box of popcorn at Utah games will cost US$3 ($4). Same with nachos, a hot dog and ice cream. A bottle of water will run you US$2.
Per the team’s press release – “a complete dining experience costing less than $14 if selecting one of each.”
(I’m assuming that $14 doesn’t include your medical co-pay after you end up in the ICU with arteries harder than marble. How about $14.50 and they throw in a head of lettuce?)
“By introducing fan-favourite concessions at incredible prices, we’re showing fans that we are listening to their needs,” Chris Barney, president of revenue and commercial strategy for the team’s owner, said in the same release.
The clue is in Barney’s title. He isn’t the president of giving stuff away for nothing.
Even for a society as financially dim as our own, this should be basic stuff. The popcorn’s no cheaper if the price of the seat you are eating it in has jumped 100 per cent. Rather the opposite.
But Utah’s offer on various salt licks ricocheted around the online sports world like it was actual news about an actual deal. The way people were talking it up, you’d think the team was offering to co-sign mortgages.
In England, people go cuckoo bananas if the local team raises prices $50 to see a once-in-a-generation glamour match.
In North America, we congratulate billionaires for giving us a $5 break on 20 cents worth of unpopped corn. And that’s after you’ve been mugged at the entrance.
This is why the European live-sports experience is superior to the North American. It’s nothing inherent in the game, or in the environs. Some of the best European stadiums are falling into the ground. You’re sitting on a bench, not a seat. There’s no heating anywhere so you’re freezing the whole time. Unless you’re going to go to a slick new spot such as Arsenal’s ground, there’s zero extravagance to be had.
But because the prices are not stratospheric, the crowd is made up of real people with real jobs and real lives. The sort who don’t spend the entire game staring at their phones, or lined up waiting for a couple of Chardonnays in plastic that cost more than a typical heating bill.
That’s changing, of course. It’s the dream of every European super club to get a sweet deal on a new stadium so that they can quadruple seat prices and take £2 off a meat pie. The Utah’ing of global sports is inevitable. But it isn’t unstoppable.
At some point, the steep, upward march of sports prices is going to end. Not because people won’t have the money – someone always does in our winners vs. losers system. But because people with money will find something cooler to spend it on.
Sports is in fashion right now. I can remember when it wasn’t. When you could get a seat in the greys at Maple Leaf Gardens for less than $20, and most nights it was not full. And that’s back when hockey was the bedrock of Canadiana. That will happen again, because eventually everything happens again.
When it does, the teams that can will move away from the live-sports model. If your TV deal is fat enough, you don’t need fans as much, or at all. An outfit such as the NFL could film its games on a sound stage. It’d be a noisy, unpopular adjustment, but it could be done if financial necessity dictated it.
Were that to happen, it’d be obvious how it went wrong – when the teams stopped treating their in-person customers like guests, and began treating them like squeeze bottles.
What would not be as obvious is who is to blame – us. We didn’t say or do anything when a local cultural necessity like the home team became available only to the well-to-do. We let them turn civic heirlooms into luxury goods.