Harrogate Town opinion: Are fans being priced out of attending matches?

Having witnessed the up and downs of the opening two weeks of the season, I found myself hankering for some form of stability results-wise, so it was almost reassuring to witness Harrogate Town and Crawley play out a no thrills goalless draw at Wetherby Road on Saturday.

An opportunity for three points missed maybe, but the Red Devils could just as easily have stolen the game themselves, and it’s still too early in the season to get carried away in one sense or another.

You certainly couldn’t fault the effort of either set of players in such oppressive circumstances, and I found myself eternally grateful for the shade of the Wetherby Road stand from where I could watch the inhabitants of the sparsely-populated Black Sheep Brewery Stand slowly roasting in the mid-afternoon heat.

No concrete to soak up the glare of the sun over there, just step after step of shiny, silver steel. It was so hot that our goalkeeper, Pete Jameson, was admitted to hospital on a drip with heatstroke in the days following the match.

It wasn’t only the Black Sheep Stand that was sparsely populated however, as the attendance of 1,304 was our lowest in the League since fans were allowed back into grounds with no restrictions.

There were a number of mitigating factors. It’s still summer and the season has started early, folk are on holiday, it was oppressively hot, there’s a cost of living crisis simmering, Crawley brought a fairly small following and a train drivers’ strike was stopping services north out of Leeds.

So, it’s all too early to tell if this was a one-off event or signs of a much deeper malaise, but it got me wondering as to how much, if at all, the admission price increases this season were starting to eat into attendance figures.

I’d been meaning to address this subject from a fan’s point of view, after all there’d been plenty of disquiet on the Town supporters’ Facebook page ever since the news had broken.

Social media and football being what it is, Simon Weaver could take his players to a Premier League title and there’d still be a minority of keyboard warriors calling for his head when we lost to Chelsea in the opening game of the following season.

But, the anecdotal evidence of more moderate long-term fans not buying season tickets this year and stating they were going to attend less was something that couldn’t be ignored. No smoke without fire, I tend to think.

I also had the evidence of my own eyes and ears. The joint cost of a Town season ticket renewal for my 17-year-old daughter and myself had rocketed from £299 to £478 - an increase well in excess of even the current sky-high rate of inflation.

If we’d been seeking to buy for the first time, the cost had shot up from £329 to an eye-watering £524.

Whilst my own renewal price had gone up from £269 to a hefty £319, with the increase on the gate it was still worthwhile for me to buy a season ticket as the cost per game came down to £13.87 and gave me seve games ‘free’. My daughter’s renewal price, however, had multiplied from £30 to £159, an increase of over five times.

This was a cost of £6.91 a game and meant she could only afford to miss three matches before the saving was wiped out. As she couldn’t make the opening match, and may have to miss another couple, we deemed it pointless buying a season ticket for her this year.

If she’d been looking to buy a season ticket for the first time, at either age 17 or 11, the club were asking £175 or £129, both a measly £9 reduction on paying for every match at the gate.

On the flipside, I’d paid £25 for an away seat at Crewe last week (there was no standing), an admission fee £2 north of the seating price at Town and £5 north of the standing price. So what was going on?

The club had justified the increase in ticket prices via a press release in June, stating there had been a price freeze since entering the Football League and that they had aligned prices with other fourth and fifth tier teams to enable investment into the club, both on and off the pitch.

The first statement was broadly true, although a £2 discount for ordering tickets online in advance had been dropped during that period.

The second statement, although all well and good if taken at face value, needed a little bit of investigation to prove its veracity, and I decided to check out prices at the other League Two clubs.

This proved more difficult than first imagined, as no one club was the same. Some clubs had a variety of charges for different stands, age classifications and brackets differed wildly, some offered early bird deals, some cheaper deals to those renewing, whilst Colchester’s tremendously complicated pricing structure might as well have been written in Chinese for all the sense I could make of it.

If this column wasn’t to prove more chaotic than a Boris Johnson Government, I needed to find some kind of structure, some sort of common ground. I therefore decided to obtain the cheapest prices for my daughter and myself to watch home games at each of the 23 other grounds.

I further divided Molly up into the age she is now and the age at which she started attending Town matches and worked out some average prices.

As far as match day admission was concerned, Town’s new prices of £20 (myself), £8 (Molly at 17) and £6 (Molly at 11) were around the average prices for the division, which I calculated at £19.40, £8.80 and £5.45.

Twelve other clubs charged £20 as a cheapest admission for adults (including Crewe), whilst Saturday’s visitors Crawley had the cheapest home tickets at £15 for adults with free admission for Molly if accompanied by me.

The middle figure of £8.80 was distorted by Bradford, Crewe and Salford charging £18, £17.50 and £15 respectively for 17-year-olds, as they’re yet to enter the real world where teenagers now have to stay on in full-time education until they’re 18.

I can safely say that Molly will be losing a year on her age when we go to Valley Parade this season, as it’ll save us a whopping £13. Her illness proved a ‘blessing’ in disguise last week before Crewe.

It was my research on season ticket pricing that floored me however.

In order to keep a level playing field I searched for the cheapest standard season ticket price I could find, without renewals, as not all clubs offered that.

I knew Town were expensive at a combined cost of £524 for an adult and a 17-year-old, but what I found shocked me to the core.

It turned out that EVERY other club in the division offered a better deal than Town, with the average price working out at £397, ranging from £250 at Rochdale to £515 at Crewe.

The Crewe price was skewed by the £17.50 match day admission price for 17-year-olds, so their season ticket price for this age range was £185 which offered a hefty discount. Town’s price being £175 on £8 admission, remember.

Town’s individual prices of £349 (adult), £175 (U18) and £129 (U12) compared very unfavourably with divisional averages of £299, £98 and £40.

To put this into some further context, only Wimbledon, Tranmere, Swindon and Stockport came in higher than Town in terms of the cheapest adult season ticket, but their U18 prices were way lower than ours.

Our charge of £175 for a 17 year old was only matched by Bradford at £174, albeit a large discount on their inflated £18 match day price and their adult/over 18 season ticket was a fantastic £198.

Twelve League Two clubs came in at under £100. Next year, based on this season’s prices, my daughter’s looking at £349 with no concessions and now no renewal price available. The club may lose her as a result.

Yet it was Town’s cheapest offer to U12s that was by some way the worst in the division. The £129 offer was over three times the average price: only four clubs topped £50 and they were all still at least £49 below Town’s price.

Four clubs even let 11-year-olds in for free if their parents bought a season ticket.

The conclusions to be drawn from my research are simple.

Town have succeeded in aligning match day admission prices with other clubs in the league. Whether they should be doing this when they’re seeking to grow the support base from a historically low level, is a debate to be saved for another day.

Many of the established league clubs we’re up against have baked in traditional support through thick and thin. Town can’t yet draw on this reserve.

Furthermore, any club that charged either a higher or comparable price on the gate, had far better season ticket offers than Town.

Our season tickets have been seriously over-inflated in price, and don’t offer good value for the investment, especially for those under 18.

If you don’t reward loyalty you can’t expect to receive it in return, and whilst it’s not for me to speculate as to how this has happened, it’s a potentially costly miscalculation by a club seeking to grow the fanbase.

If you’ve hooked a supporter in with a reasonably-priced season ticket, they’re there supporting you through thick and thin, and you have their money.

We’re now reliant on the team performing well enough on the pitch in the middle of a looming cost of living crisis to attract enough floating spectators through the gates on an ad-hoc basis.

If energy and food prices continue to fly through the roof whilst the Government twiddles its thumbs, many regulars will have no option but to pick and choose when they can afford to attend, if at all.

If performances dip or an unfashionable club is in town, many floating fans, not tied to the club by their season ticket, will also choose to spend their limited money elsewhere. The latter will certainly have been a factor affecting the Crawley attendance this weekend.

I write this not in a spirit of criticism, it pains me to have to do so, but solely with the club’s best interests at heart. Hopefully Town can seek to do something towards correcting the imbalance, as I believe that the future of the club going forward depends on it.