It's a rip-off - and not just in the Prem
Paul Wilson
Sunday September 18, 2005
The Observer
Last month we predicted that empty seats and high prices would be the talking points of the new football season and, although Wayne Rooney has done his best to provide a diversion, the damning evidence was there to see in midweek. Football's empty seats even made the front page of yesterday's Financial Times
A crowd of less than 30,000 watched Chelsea start their Champions League defence against Anderlecht, while Steve McClaren was so incensed at the 14,191 turnout at the Riverside for Middlesbrough's Uefa Cup game against Skoda Xanthi he accused fans of letting down Steve Gibson.
'The chairman has worked very hard to bring European football to this club and I am disappointed for him that the team has not been backed by the fans,' the Boro manager said.
It is rarely a good idea for clubs to start haranguing supporters over their non-attendance: that's not how the entertainment business is supposed to work.
McClaren's comments were well intentioned but misguided. You could tell the club were worried about selling this fixture because they dropped the price to £20, something Chelsea have yet to do. McClaren needs to bear in mind that Teesside is not the most prosperous area of the country, that Boro were not exactly scintillating in the Uefa Cup last season, that no one outside Greece has ever heard of Xanthi, that football had been all over the television all week and that the Uefa Cup itself is a sadly devalued tournament. Bolton drew only 19,000 the same night for their first ever European game.
These attendances do not suggest the English game is in better shape than it has ever been, on and off the pitch, which is what its marketeers keep telling us. Empty seats suggest something else entirely: a game that has its sums wrong.
While the product on the pitch is still recognisably English, and good, knockabout fun much of the time, life in the Premiership is far from fun for the dozen or so clubs who are scared to death of going down. Far too many fixtures are about survival and many are much too grim to be classed as entertainment. And money is the problem.
Money is also the problem in a much more obvious sense - and not just in the Premiership - when you compare ticket prices around Europe. In the summer, Juventus signed Patrick Vieira from Arsenal and Woking signed Clint Davies, a goalkeeper, from Perth. It costs more to watch the Aussie stop the shots in a Conference game in Surrey than it does to watch the World Cup winning Frenchman at the Stadio delle Alpi. Woking £14 a seat, Juventus £13.80. Explain that.
Here are some other prices: Real Madrid €20, Valencia €18, Roma is €15, Juventus €20 for league games and €30 for the Champions League - less than half of what it cost to watch Chelsea v West Brom reserves last month.
In Germany, long the home of decent football at reasonable prices, a mere €12 will get you into Bayer Leverkusen, Bayern Munich or Borussia Dortmund next week, and tickets for Bayern's next Champions League game are €25. Children can watch most German games for €6 (£4.30). Everton, the people's club, will be charging kids £17 next week to watch Wigan. Chelsea want the full £45 for any seat, any age, any game. Plus booking fee.
Premiership clubs are not uniformly avaricious - Blackburn and Aston Villa have adult tickets for £15 and West Brom and Wigan have schemes where children can watch for a fiver - but taken as a whole English football is far too expensive. It is not easy to take English football as a whole - price fluctuations even within the Premiership are enormous - but when it costs more to watch Woking or Accrington Stanley than it does to see Roma or Bayern Munich, there is probably something wrong.
And, nice try, Steve, but it's no good blaming the fans.
Where shall we go? Selected seat prices for one adult and one child for next home game, not including this weekend. (Prices exclude booking fees.)
Chelsea £90 Birmingham £60.50 Newcastle £56 Portsmouth £52 Everton £46 Real Madrid £28.60 Bolton £26 Valencia £24.80 Crawley Town £24 Hereford £22 Roma £21.40 Juventus £20.70 Blackburn £20 Aston Villa £20 Woking £19 Bayern Munich £12.40 Borussia Dortmund £12 Bayern Leverkusen £11.70 Schalke £9.30
Whelan is getting shirty
So, Dave Whelan thinks Sven-Goran Eriksson should be sacked, does he? 'It's obvious the FA don't have the guts to get rid of the England manager even though he has had his chance,' Wigan's outspoken chairman reckons. 'The system under Sven is flawed.'
Few could argue, though the beleaguered Eriksson might wonder why he is now coming under attack from Premiership arrivistes with no senior internationals in their squad. What has rattled Whelan's cage?
It couldn't be that he is also boss of JJB Sports, could it? The same JJB Sports who are the official suppliers of England replica kits, and whose share price dips every time England stutter?
The company has reported an upturn in cricket sales this summer, but that only means some stores have gone from no business to speak of to shifting more than a dozen bats per week. JJB are relying on a massive England shirt sale next summer, and it just won't happen if England aren't in Germany. Sales executives were visibly shaken by the last three performances; now it sounds like their leader is starting to panic.
Are Wayne's mates the problem?
Sir Alex Ferguson tore a strip off Wayne Rooney in the privacy of the Villarreal dressing room, doubtless for disobeying instructions. Ferguson is not the sort of manager to fail to factor the referee into an important game and, having had previous with Kim Milton Nielsen's punctilious style, his last advice to his players would have been: don't mess with this bloke.
Given that Rooney's stupidity will cost Manchester United in the short and long term, as opponents and referees cotton on to how easily he can be wound up, Ferguson had every right to be furious. Rooney's reaction appeared to mirror Lauren. Not the Arsenal full-back but comedian Catherine Tate's insolent 'Am I bovvered?' teenager. The evening after letting his side down in Spain, Rooney appeared on stage with Rio Ferdinand at a concert featuring American rapper 50 Cent.
There you have the modern manager's dilemma in a nutshell. Not only is your moody teenage millionaire prepared to make a fool of himself on stage as well as on the pitch, not only is he banned from the Champions League as well as the next England match, but he has started running around with Rio Ferdinand. Come back Coleen, all is forgiven. Ferdinand's popularity with Old Trafford supporters is far lower than it was two years ago, and if Rooney continues to abuse his God-given talent with displays of complete oafishness he, too, will turn people against him.
The debate about whether Rooney needs an arm round his shoulder, a kick up the arse or a therapy session with anger-management professionals (any chance of filming that?) is too boring to go into here. Rooney may not be a Mensa candidate, but surely he possesses the tools to sort this problem out himself. Football is the one thing he knows. It is impossible to believe he has come this far this quickly without learning to control his temper for 90 minutes. Why is he now going backwards?
Rooney's temperament was never an issue for England throughout Euro 2004, but surfaced with a vengeance in Madrid last year. Ferdinand was back for that game, of course, after missing the summer through suspension. Probably just a coincidence, like 50 Cent still being alive after being shot nine times. Or being best known for a track called 'Outta Control'.
http://football.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,4284,1572820,00.html
Paul Wilson
Sunday September 18, 2005
The Observer
Last month we predicted that empty seats and high prices would be the talking points of the new football season and, although Wayne Rooney has done his best to provide a diversion, the damning evidence was there to see in midweek. Football's empty seats even made the front page of yesterday's Financial Times
A crowd of less than 30,000 watched Chelsea start their Champions League defence against Anderlecht, while Steve McClaren was so incensed at the 14,191 turnout at the Riverside for Middlesbrough's Uefa Cup game against Skoda Xanthi he accused fans of letting down Steve Gibson.
'The chairman has worked very hard to bring European football to this club and I am disappointed for him that the team has not been backed by the fans,' the Boro manager said.
It is rarely a good idea for clubs to start haranguing supporters over their non-attendance: that's not how the entertainment business is supposed to work.
McClaren's comments were well intentioned but misguided. You could tell the club were worried about selling this fixture because they dropped the price to £20, something Chelsea have yet to do. McClaren needs to bear in mind that Teesside is not the most prosperous area of the country, that Boro were not exactly scintillating in the Uefa Cup last season, that no one outside Greece has ever heard of Xanthi, that football had been all over the television all week and that the Uefa Cup itself is a sadly devalued tournament. Bolton drew only 19,000 the same night for their first ever European game.
These attendances do not suggest the English game is in better shape than it has ever been, on and off the pitch, which is what its marketeers keep telling us. Empty seats suggest something else entirely: a game that has its sums wrong.
While the product on the pitch is still recognisably English, and good, knockabout fun much of the time, life in the Premiership is far from fun for the dozen or so clubs who are scared to death of going down. Far too many fixtures are about survival and many are much too grim to be classed as entertainment. And money is the problem.
Money is also the problem in a much more obvious sense - and not just in the Premiership - when you compare ticket prices around Europe. In the summer, Juventus signed Patrick Vieira from Arsenal and Woking signed Clint Davies, a goalkeeper, from Perth. It costs more to watch the Aussie stop the shots in a Conference game in Surrey than it does to watch the World Cup winning Frenchman at the Stadio delle Alpi. Woking £14 a seat, Juventus £13.80. Explain that.
Here are some other prices: Real Madrid €20, Valencia €18, Roma is €15, Juventus €20 for league games and €30 for the Champions League - less than half of what it cost to watch Chelsea v West Brom reserves last month.
In Germany, long the home of decent football at reasonable prices, a mere €12 will get you into Bayer Leverkusen, Bayern Munich or Borussia Dortmund next week, and tickets for Bayern's next Champions League game are €25. Children can watch most German games for €6 (£4.30). Everton, the people's club, will be charging kids £17 next week to watch Wigan. Chelsea want the full £45 for any seat, any age, any game. Plus booking fee.
Premiership clubs are not uniformly avaricious - Blackburn and Aston Villa have adult tickets for £15 and West Brom and Wigan have schemes where children can watch for a fiver - but taken as a whole English football is far too expensive. It is not easy to take English football as a whole - price fluctuations even within the Premiership are enormous - but when it costs more to watch Woking or Accrington Stanley than it does to see Roma or Bayern Munich, there is probably something wrong.
And, nice try, Steve, but it's no good blaming the fans.
Where shall we go? Selected seat prices for one adult and one child for next home game, not including this weekend. (Prices exclude booking fees.)
Chelsea £90 Birmingham £60.50 Newcastle £56 Portsmouth £52 Everton £46 Real Madrid £28.60 Bolton £26 Valencia £24.80 Crawley Town £24 Hereford £22 Roma £21.40 Juventus £20.70 Blackburn £20 Aston Villa £20 Woking £19 Bayern Munich £12.40 Borussia Dortmund £12 Bayern Leverkusen £11.70 Schalke £9.30
Whelan is getting shirty
So, Dave Whelan thinks Sven-Goran Eriksson should be sacked, does he? 'It's obvious the FA don't have the guts to get rid of the England manager even though he has had his chance,' Wigan's outspoken chairman reckons. 'The system under Sven is flawed.'
Few could argue, though the beleaguered Eriksson might wonder why he is now coming under attack from Premiership arrivistes with no senior internationals in their squad. What has rattled Whelan's cage?
It couldn't be that he is also boss of JJB Sports, could it? The same JJB Sports who are the official suppliers of England replica kits, and whose share price dips every time England stutter?
The company has reported an upturn in cricket sales this summer, but that only means some stores have gone from no business to speak of to shifting more than a dozen bats per week. JJB are relying on a massive England shirt sale next summer, and it just won't happen if England aren't in Germany. Sales executives were visibly shaken by the last three performances; now it sounds like their leader is starting to panic.
Are Wayne's mates the problem?
Sir Alex Ferguson tore a strip off Wayne Rooney in the privacy of the Villarreal dressing room, doubtless for disobeying instructions. Ferguson is not the sort of manager to fail to factor the referee into an important game and, having had previous with Kim Milton Nielsen's punctilious style, his last advice to his players would have been: don't mess with this bloke.
Given that Rooney's stupidity will cost Manchester United in the short and long term, as opponents and referees cotton on to how easily he can be wound up, Ferguson had every right to be furious. Rooney's reaction appeared to mirror Lauren. Not the Arsenal full-back but comedian Catherine Tate's insolent 'Am I bovvered?' teenager. The evening after letting his side down in Spain, Rooney appeared on stage with Rio Ferdinand at a concert featuring American rapper 50 Cent.
There you have the modern manager's dilemma in a nutshell. Not only is your moody teenage millionaire prepared to make a fool of himself on stage as well as on the pitch, not only is he banned from the Champions League as well as the next England match, but he has started running around with Rio Ferdinand. Come back Coleen, all is forgiven. Ferdinand's popularity with Old Trafford supporters is far lower than it was two years ago, and if Rooney continues to abuse his God-given talent with displays of complete oafishness he, too, will turn people against him.
The debate about whether Rooney needs an arm round his shoulder, a kick up the arse or a therapy session with anger-management professionals (any chance of filming that?) is too boring to go into here. Rooney may not be a Mensa candidate, but surely he possesses the tools to sort this problem out himself. Football is the one thing he knows. It is impossible to believe he has come this far this quickly without learning to control his temper for 90 minutes. Why is he now going backwards?
Rooney's temperament was never an issue for England throughout Euro 2004, but surfaced with a vengeance in Madrid last year. Ferdinand was back for that game, of course, after missing the summer through suspension. Probably just a coincidence, like 50 Cent still being alive after being shot nine times. Or being best known for a track called 'Outta Control'.
http://football.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,4284,1572820,00.html
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