Man Utd have confirmed season ticket price hikes this week and the decision to do away with some bigger discounts on senior prices has caused controversy.
Look at a balance sheet and strip away the emotion. One faceless football fan is getting a discount of 50% on their season ticket, while another is getting just 25% off. With money to be made, it’s an anomaly you want to put an end to.
So that is what Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos empire does. The cost-cutting extraordinaires decide that a 25% discount rate will now be introduced for every senior citizen season ticket at Old Trafford. The club ended the half-price discount for new senior rates a couple of years ago.
Maybe it will add another £500,000 to the budget. Or maybe those elderly fans will give up their cheap seats, and Manchester United can put them back on the market for top dollar. Perhaps it won’t be a season ticket seat any more, but that can be sold week to week to different supporters who might pop into the Megastore and splash the cash on a rare visit to Old Trafford.
This is the panacea that United – and many other clubs, it should be said – are chasing now. Tickets that are sold on a game-by-game basis to customers who might only attend one or two games a season, but will spend heavily while they are there.
And yes, they are now seen as customers rather than fans. That is how Premier League clubs view the people who attend their games and it is certainly what this Manchester United regime thinks of the people who pack Old Trafford every week.
This is a decision made from the point of view of a business that deals with customers. If you can’t afford it, don’t buy it. Someone else will.
But football clubs cannot be treated as any other business, and those business-savvy owners who get involved with clubs soon find out that trying to do so is unpopular. Ratcliffe has had a taste of that already, and the anger that has risen to the surface since Monday’s announcement of ticket price changes suggests he will get more flak coming his way.
The 5% rise in prices across the board has been criticised, but the cuts to senior discounts have formed the base for most of the disgruntlement. There is no escaping from the fact that hundreds of lifelong United fans who have been going to Old Trafford for decades will now be forced to stop going to the game.
That is the human cost of a decision made purely on finance. United were gradually phasing out the 50% senior discount by no longer offering those rates to new ticket holders. But this decision has fast-tracked that and dramatically altered the cost of supporting their team for elderly fans.
During recent protests at Old Trafford, the mantra has been ‘your debt not ours’, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that supporters are expected to foot a part of the bill for paying off the Glazers’ debt. Ratcliffe has remained silent on that, as the deal compelled him to do, but it was a terrible look that on the weekend when he opted to break cover and praise the club’s despised majority owners, he then hit fans in the pocket just a couple of days later.
“To be fair to the Glazers, they’re really good on the commercial side. The people who advise me say the fans don’t want to hear it. So I’ve got to be cautious. I get a lot of criticism if I support the Glazers, but the fact is they’re really decent people,” Ratcliffe said in an interview with The Sunday Times.
“They’re East Coast, you know – that old East Coast America, they’re very polite, they’re very civilized, they’re the nicest people on the planet. There isn’t a bad bone in Joel Glazer’s body. Part of the problem is there isn’t a bad bone in his body.
“We have a very professional partnership with the Glazer family. They’re really honest and straightforward, not what you expect when you read about them in the press. And they’re both [Avram and Joel – the most involved in the club] passionate about Manchester United. I like them as people.”
It was an astonishing way to describe a family who have loaded this club with debt to the extent that Ratcliffe is now sacking staff and fleecing fans to balance the books. He couldn’t criticise the Glazers, but he didn’t have to praise them.
But he is right that they are impressive businesspeople, and maybe that is why Ratcliffe likes them so much. Because, just like them, he sees Manchester United as a business as well. Customers, not fans.