 Wednesday, 25th May 2011 21:03 by Clive Whittingham Well the serene celebratory atmosphere around QPR lasted just over a fortnight. In the first of three features this evening, LoftforWords examines the new ticket prices Rangers fans will be paying come August.. Well the serene celebratory atmosphere around QPR lasted just over a fortnight. In the first of three features this evening, LoftforWords examines the new ticket prices Rangers fans will be paying come August.. Boutique club, boutique pricesAround the bustling QPR message boards today I’ve read posts from some angry people, some happy people, some very upset people, some relieved people, some people who have resigned themselves to becoming armchair QPR supporters after years of attendance and some disappointed people. I am yet to read anything from anybody who is surprised though. No, after four years of Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore at the helm of the good ship QPR, the crew know exactly what to expect. On the train home this evening I actually found myself smiling as I recalled a message board post of my own from back in 2007 when the takeover by Briatore was on the cusp of completion. “At least,” I naively mused, “the club can finally do away with that rip off 50p booking fee now they’ve got some money.” That’s right up there with me backing Middlesbrough and Doncaster for promotion pushes this season. Within a few weeks it had been increased to £3.50. That £3.50 will now be tagged on to season ticket prices of between £549 and £999 and, of far greater concern, some unbelievably high walk up prices. I’ll take the season ticket prices first, as they are the ones the club has promoted today while rather burying the obscene cost of individual match tickets in the small print. It was Bill Gates, in his brief incarnation as a Simpsons character, who said “I didn’t get rich by writing a lot of cheques” and anybody who thought our club’s owners were going to use the promotion to the Premiership as an opportunity to repay the loyalty of supporters through the lean times by freezing ticket prices, or raising them by a nominal amount, was always kidding themselves. Remember that even after a massive hike in their first full summer in charge, while we were still a struggling Championship side, the board then tried to raise them again mid-season by introducing ‘category A’ games. Only a complaint by our next opponents Derby and intervention from the Football League prevented them from doing so and I doubt Richard Scudamore and his bum chums in the Premiership give enough of a stuff to intervene this time around. From a QPR fan’s point of view we have two problems. Firstly we play in a very small ground. We have just 18,000 seats to sell at 19 matches next season – that’s just 342,000 tickets to sell over the next nine months. Manchester United, at the opposite end of the scale, have the best part of 1.5million tickets to sell next season for their league games alone and with runs in the two domestic cups and Europe almost a given you can probably double that. Of those 18,000 seats at Loftus Road at least 2,000 and anything up to 3,100 of them are for away fans, and last season 8,600 of them were taken by season ticket holders. If the whole of the School End remains for away fans and our season ticket sales reach the 9,000 cap that leaves less than 6,000 seats to sell on a match by match basis. Last season the club also released half season tickets, and five match ticket bundles, which meant by the time the tickets for the final game of the season against Leeds went on sale there were only 3,000 left and they were gone in a day. That Leeds match sent a clear message to the board at QPR – if the match is big enough, the support is there to fill the ground and more besides. I have seen people on message boards today trying to compare us with “like” clubs. This, in my opinion, is futile, because there are no ‘like’ clubs. Nobody in the Premiership next season will have only 15,000 seats to sell to home fans. Nobody in the Premiership next season will have only 6,000 tickets available to buy on a match by match basis. The nearest thing there is to us in the Premiership, in every sense of the word ‘near’, is Fulham who also have a relatively small, ageing stadium with limited revenue making opportunities. However Fulham’s Craven Cottage ground is bigger than Loftus Road, and their support level is traditionally lower than ours. Yes Fulham sell out most weeks in the Premiership, but never does a bus go by on the Fulham Palace Road without an advert for one cheap ticket deal there or another. They have to work hard to fill their ground despite its size, Bernie Ecclestone is clearly of the opinion that QPR do not. Fulham, and Ecclestone, lead me onto my second problem. A club playing in a ground like Loftus Road, or Craven Cottage, cannot sustain Premiership football naturally. Modern day football stadiums work hard for their living – they turn over millions in hospitality, they house 40,000 people and more, they are in action every day of the week for corporate hospitality, or exams, or as hotels, or anything. Arsenal’s matchday income from the Emirates Stadium is just shy of £100m a season. That’s what we’re competing with here. Fulham combat this by relying on one man, Mohammed Al Fayed. The recent Guardian feature on the financial health of Premiership clubs show that they are now getting on for £200m worth of debt, almost all of it owed to him. As long as he never calls it in, they’re fine. But then Cardiff said the same with Sam Hamman. QPR’s owners have said right from the start that they would not be the next Abromovic, or Al Fayed. They have railed against the “richest club in the world” tag by repeatedly stating that they are rich, the club is not. They have sustained losses, said to be around £1m a month, but have not thrown silly money at silly players. Our promotion this season was down to shrewd management and good signings on a budget, not because we blew the competition out of the water with a series of £4m signings. To compete on the field next season QPR will need significant investment from the board and consequently they were never going to commit to this and leave ticket prices as they are. The difference today’s rise will make is relatively small – let’s say the average season ticket at Loftus Road last season was around the £500 mark (mine was £539 in Gold) that means sales of 8,600 brought in £4.3m. Let’s say the average ticket price is now £700 (mine is now £759) and they sell all 9,000 of them – that’s only an extra £2m in income. And £2m doesn’t buy you much in the Premiership. They could easily have just left ticket prices where they were and said “what’s another £2m?” But then Ecclestone and Briatore strike me as the kind of people who’d pick a fiver up out of the gutter if they saw it blowing past. I’ve seen Blackburn mentioned as a case study today – but their rock bottom prices are a result of having a 30,000 ground in an 80,000 population town surrounded by Man Utd, Man City, Liverpool, Everton and Leeds. I’ve seen Wolves mentioned too, their prices have changed little since their Championship days (we can expect to pay £28 in their away end next season compared to £48 at Fulham and Man Utd) and they are currently reporting a £9m profit after sensible management on and off the field. But again, Molineux works a lot harder than Loftus Road ever could, and seats more people, and Wolves have a far bigger support base than our own. Given those circumstances the season ticket prices are, on the whole, not too bad in my opinion. That may be because I’d long since prepared myself to be paying between £700-£800. People can bring up the example of German football, quite rightly, but at the end of the day for Premiership football, in London, that is probably the going rate especially given the special circumstances QPR find themselves in. Now two things were missing from the season ticket pricing brochure when it was released onto the official website this morning. The first thing was the “walk up” prices. It has become a LoftforWords tradition, on the day the season ticket prices are released, to immediately go on the message board and denounce them as a complete rip off before declaring that you will “pick and choose” your matches from now on. And perhaps looking at the increased price of season tickets this morning that may have been your first though as well. If it was you probably then scrolled down through the brochure looking for how the games would be costed up match by match. Next season at Loftus Road will see a return of the game categories, whereby the visits of Manchester United and Chelsea will cost significantly more to attend than games with Wigan and Blackburn. This is quite a sensible and reasonable way of doing things, however two years ago Flavio Briatore attempted to use it as a tool to jack prices up in the middle of a campaign by belatedly introducing game categories and then categorising everything as ‘A’ – a move the league quickly put a stop to. Perhaps all the negative publicity that came the club’s way over that is why the only reason I know there will be different game categories next season is because Jim White let it slip when he was auctioning off prizes at the Player of the Year dinner. There has never been official confirmation of it. There was no confirmation of it in the brochure this morning either, where you would probably expect to find it. Instead the small print and a calculator were required to guide the way. Underneath the new season ticket prices, by way of encouraging you to buy one, it states the saving you make by buying a season ticket instead of paying match by match. By adding the two figures and dividing them by the number of home games you get a match by match figure, which for my seat is £57 a game. Add in the category matches and it seems that the cheapest seat at Loftus Road next season, behind a post in the Q Block for a home game with Wigan, will be £47 for an adult. For Chelsea at home my seat will cost £72 to buy a single ticket for. Platinum seats will cost the best part of £1 a minute for the big games. This, by any stretch of the imagination, is absolutely ludicrous. A scandalous rip off. A piss take. Extortion. This will literally price out supporters. Those who Flavio Briatore once so nonchalantly dismissed as the “people who come once a week and pay £20” are now people he would like to come once a week and pay £70 and people just can’t afford that. Those who cannot afford to pay more than £600 for a season ticket, who have previously relied upon individual match tickets will now watch QPR on the television or not at all. Our club, and football in general, seems to forget that there is more to life than the fucking Barclays Premier League. There are mouths to feed and families to support. When people are looking down credit card statements at the end of the month £25 for a day at the football can be justified, £72 just for the ticket often cannot. But, they wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t think people will pay it. In the short term QPR will get away with this. We haven’t been in the Premiership for 15 years and the hunger is there, the appetite and excitement is there. I expect the season tickets to sell out. But let’s say we’re bottom at Christmas and doing a bit of a Derby County – will people pay upwards of £47 to watch a poor QPR side lose at home to Wigan? What if we get relegated, will the prices revert back to their Championship level? I very much doubt it don’t you? If we were to be relegated I’d expect the new Championship season to kick off in front of barely 10,000 people. And let’s say we do survive and consolidate at the highest level – how long before people get bored? Every season just aiming for 42 points, quickly exiting both cups in case a run undermines our league form, treating 17th in the table as a success – how long before the novelty wears off and people find something else to spend they £72 on, even when Man Utd are in town? None of this appears to have been thought through. Neither does much consideration seem to have been given to the ‘dad’s and lads’. Junior and OAP prices have increased by 100% and more in some areas. Every second person I know at QPR was introduced to the club, the ground and the matchday experience by going along with their old man. These days what is there to encourage a dad to take his lad to football? Where is this next generation of QPR supporters coming from? Football clubs rely on the loyalty (stupidity) of their supporters. No other industry would have been able to get away with hiking up its prices time and time and time again through a recession while providing the same product and maintain its customer base. At QPR supporters like me and thousands of others have stayed loyal through some rancid times. We’ve done the Tuesday nights in Barnsley and the midweek home defeats to Ipswich. Our reward for this? Zero. There is no discount for renewing a season ticket as opposed to just suddenly deciding having never followed QPR before that you quite fancy some Premiership football this season and buying one. There is no discount for renewing early, as there has been in previous years. There is just a five week period of grace to find the money, whereas in previous years we have had three months or more. There is no recognition for people who stumped up their hard earned cash last season and backed the team when few people expected anything of it. My loyalty points topped 180 last season – my reward for this? I’m still waiting for it. In fact, it’s worse than zero. Further small print lower down the form reveals that not only is your loyalty not being rewarded, but you’re being asked to pay £35 to prove it again. Having accepted that the season ticket price rises are, almost, reasonable I scanned down my form looking for the away season ticket option and find myself confronted with the “Super Hoop membership”. This, at a cost of an additional £35, gives you first option on guest tickets for home games, first option on the purchase of an away ticket, 30 loyalty points, and the opportunity to apply for (but not necessarily succeed in getting) an away season ticket. Given the language the promotional material is written in you’d think this was a good deal but let’s stop and think for a moment. Is this not the stuff that we got as part of being a season ticket holder last season? I mean £539 (now £759) is a lot of money to be shelling out just for a seat at 23 (now 19) football games, there should be some other stuff thrown in there as well and this used to be it. It was controversial around the time of the Leeds game but season ticket holders have always known they get first preference on guest tickets, first dibs on away tickets and so on. Now, in addition to a vastly inflated season ticket price, we have to pay another £35 to get the stuff we got for free before. The second thing that was missing from the form, in addition to the walk up prices was the usual gushing statement from either chairman Ishan Saksena, or Amit Bhatia. Black Wednesday – part two, will be on LoftforWords later this evening. If LFW bangs on for far too long for your liking, why not follow us on Twitter @loftforwords where we only get 140 characters. Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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