Ticket pricing is always an emotive issue.

It’s easy to reminisce about the days when the cost of attending a game was less than it now costs to purchase a pie or a pint, but over time the cost of everything increases – my parents bought their first property for four figures back in the ’80s while mine cost more than forty times as much roughly thirty years later.

Pretty much every item of expenditure with which Arsenal are faced has increased at a rate far outstripping inflation since Arsene Wenger joined the club, whether that be transfer fees, wages or even simple running costs. Back in 1996, Arsenal’s record signing remained the £7.5m paid for Dennis Bergkamp. Today, that sum looks like peanuts against the £42.5m paid out to secure the services of one Mesut Ozil, despite both being equally step change signings for the club.

This week, Arsenal announced that the home game against Bayern Munich in the Champions League group stages would be a category A fixture, with associated pricing, to great uproar from the Gunners community. This means that the cheapest ticket for the match (excluding concessions) will cost £64 for the evening’s entertainment.

But seriously, what did we all expect? That the team that won the Champions League and the FIFA Club World Cup in 2013 would be priced the same as or lower than this weekend’s opposition Stokelona? If you want to buy a new car, you would hardly expect to get a Mercedes for the price of a Fiat Panda, after all. (Did you see what I did there, likening Bayern to an efficient German car, and Stoke to…a Fiat Panda?)

If you go to a concert for a top performer, or a high-end theatre show, you wouldn’t find yourself with much change from that £64, and it is these type of quality evenings to which an Arsenal-Bayern clash is comparable, not a bit of karaoke down the local.

And that’s before we get to the quality of the surroundings – the Emirates is a palace compared to the likes of Stamford Bridge, Old Trafford and White Hart Lane. Of the top sides in England, only Manchester City have a stadium that can even get close to Arsenal’s in terms of visitor experience. At Tottenham, there is a solitary female toilet that serves the entirety of the East Upper Stand. The same is true for the away end at Old Trafford.

Premium comes at a price, and Bayern is pretty much the football definition of premium.
But what if we look past the question of value and worth?

A vicious cycle

Lewis and I were musing on the ticket pricing conundrum earlier this week. There’s a familiar series of themes with us Arsenal fans, where we moan about not spending money, we beg the club to spend money on players and wages, and then when we do sign superstars and hand the likes of Ozil and Alexis bumper paychecks, the questions return: why do tickets cost so much?

Having a sugar daddy would be a nice state of affairs, for as long as it lasts, but who’s to say what will happen when the likes of Abramovich pull out? In any case, we don’t have that luxury.

It’s to be expected

Arsenal Football Club is a business, and a self-sustaining one at that. For all our improvement, we do not (yet) have the firepower of the four powerhouses Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester United and their bumper commercial deals, but the aim of the business model is to put us in a position where we can compete at that level, once the on-field successes return.

For a game like Bayern, Arsenal could easily sell hundreds of thousands of tickets at pretty much whatever price we like, and it’s one of just six group games, and only three home group games. Compare this to a league fixture which is one of 38 games, and typically a lower standard of football, and it’s clear that the tickets will be in higher demand.

Ultimately the club, like any business, is entitled to charge whatever price finds some sort of equilibrium between supply and demand, and in this case the demand far exceeds the supply, even at Category A prices. It’s not as if the club have slapped “special” pricing on the game, it has merely been grouped with the better games you are likely to see at the Emirates.

Then there is the question of season tickets – the lowest priced season ticket works out at a smidgen under £40 per game, more expensive than the equivalent of a category B game in the same seats. These supporters pay that price per game irrespective of whether they are watching Bayern Munich or Bournemouth, and they sign up to that commitment before having any idea of who we will draw in the first seven Champions League and FA Cup games included in the ticket.

Even if you work on the basis that having fans in the stadium is more important than the cash they bring in, that ultimately comes down to a business calculation insofar as it assumes the (far from guaranteed) prize money from winning things outweighs the money brought in from ticket sales.

Arsenal have by far the greatest percentage of income from matchday revenue of the top English clubs, with 33% compared to Manchester United (25%), Chelsea (22%) and Manchester City (14%), and that revenue is a large piece of the puzzle when it comes to financially competing for the top players.

The argument still remains that Arsenal have money sitting in the bank, so why can’t that money be used to subsidise ticket prices? But the reality is that this money has been earmarked for player purchases, which for one reason or another didn’t come to fruition this window.

In most businesses, when you have spare cash you can either return it to the shareholders, or you can hold it in hand until a suitable acquisition target emerges, and that is exactly what Arsenal are doing. Imagine if Arsene came out next summer and announced that we would like to sign Nr Top Top Quality Striker but can’t because the money was used to subsidise ticket pricing? Uproar.

But is it fair?

We need to safeguard the next generation of Arsenal fans. Shouldn’t every supporter have a chance to attend a game?

Absolutely.

But going back to my car analogy, you don’t buy your seventeen-year-old offspring a Range Rover Sport – you buy them a clapped out car with 100,000 miles on the clock or, if you can afford it, the latest model of a hot hatchback with the highest safety rating in the world.

There are plenty of tickets available for Arsenal games – several thousand tickets are put aside for red members for every match, League Cup games are heavily discounted and junior tickets are also available at lower prices.

Bayern Munich in the Champions League is a premium product, with a premium price tag. And so it should be.

The question arises – if you want to cap ticket prices, where do you draw the line? Some people can afford £100 a ticket, some can afford £50, some just £10. Some cannot afford to pay anything at all for the privilege of watching the Arsenal. Why are those who can afford “mid-table” price any more entitled to have tickets available to them at that price than those in the “relegation zone”?

I get that it’s hard for someone who has been going to Arsenal all their life to no longer be able to afford, or in many cases justify, the cost of a ticket. Truly. But desire isn’t enough – there are tens of thousands still on the waiting list for a season ticket who cannot get their hands on a regular seat. Is there much of a difference between denying people a ticket on financial grounds compared to availability grounds?

If you’re going to go down the affordability route, then you will effectively end up giving tickets out for free, at great cost to the club, and ultimately once everyone can afford a ticket, how do you determine who actually gets to sit in one of the 60,000 thrones? Having a ballot for the FA Cup final kept so many of us happy after all…

We live in a capitalist society, for better or for worse.

Fight the good fight

I wrote back in January when the ticket freeze was announced about the importance of fans attending games and contributing to the on-field success with vocal support. But when Bayern come to town, there will be no shortage of bums on seats to roar the team forward.

It’s hard to get too excited about Category A pricing for this very reason – as with all premium products, if you want them you have to pay the market rate. It’s the exact same principle we berate Arsene Wenger for: not being prepared to pay more than the perceived “value” when that value is set by the demand.

The more interesting question is really whether the pricing is right for some of the category B games (Sunderland, we’re looking at you) where we probably won’t fill every seat. Tickets are available, but will remain unsold.

And although great strides have been made with the Ticket Exchange system, there are still too many empty seats on match days where season ticket holders who can’t make it or can’t be bothered to make it don’t sell on their seats. Yes, the club still get the money for the headcount, but the team don’t get the volume of support that can make all the difference. Maybe there should be consequences for not using your ticket…

So if you want to pick a fight with the club over ticket pricing, be my guest – I’m right beside you. But make sure you pick the right fight.