Chelsea have recently made the commitment to keep their season ticket prices the same next season – it’s a decision that didn’t get too much credit at the time as the Blues have done so badly on the pitch under this new ownership that raising prices would have been a PR catastrophe that even they were able to see coming.
But apart from that one freeze, across the board in 2023 tickets for live events, particularly football, are exploding in cost, as big ticketing resale companies take their undeserved cut. The solution, as ExpressVPN shows, is cutting out the middleman and using ethical ticket resale platforms.
Real-life ticket scalps have been a common occurrence at football matches and live concerts for as long as there have been paper tickets. Anyone who has been to Stamford Bridge will know the familiar cry: “tickets, tickets, buying, selling, tickets, tickets!”
It’s becoming more subtle now as the police have cracked down on it at the club’s behest, but unfortunately, the progression has become just the formalisation of the process. Now, instead of a local chancer buying unwanted tickets and selling them on to another punter with a markup, big companies are sticking their oar in on a vast scale.
The article linked above says that fans can expect to pay more than 2,000% of the original cost of tickets to some major concerts. They note that tickets to last weekend’s Eurovision concert in Liverpool, for example, were marked up from £380 to £3469 – an 813% increase.
It’s becoming a barrier for ordinary fans to see their favourite teams and favourite artists. The atmosphere at Stamford Bridge gets worse every year because the only people who seem to be able to afford tickets now are American bankers who want to come with their families and sit quietly all game. The young men and women who joined in the chants most voraciously are being squeezed out of the equation, and while Chelsea are particularly badly affected because of their situation in the most expensive part of London, the same process will spread across the country.
If we’re going to pay big money to watch our team, the money should go to the players who are on the pitch or to the club so that it can invest in upgrading the stadium or improving the academy and its grass root connections.
Sites like SeatGeek and StubHub, or Ticketmaster are a parasite on sports and music, and they add nothing and instead just drain people’s hard-earned money out of the equation, changing stadium atmospheres for the worst and pricing out the less well-off. The sooner clubs like Chelsea clamp down on them and create a cheaper, fairer system, the better.
