cheap tickets but for how long?

Published on May 18, 2011 by Jamie McGregor · No Comments

This Saturday, six teams and six sets of fans will play the most important 90 minutes of their season as they bid to avoid being the third team to drop to Segunda División. At La Riazor, Anoeta, Reyno de Navarra, Ono Estadi and Ciutat de Valéncia Stadiums, the fans of Deportivo de La Coruña, Real Sociedad, Getafe, Osasuna, Real Mallorca and Real Zaragoza will be praying their team gets the win needed to guarantee La Liga football for another season. The fans are not the only people who’ll be nervous, the directors of each club will also be well aware of the financial impact of relegation.

For that reason, all the clubs involved in the relegation fight have made a special effort to get the fans on board to support the team. Deportivo put 12,000 tickets on sale for just 5 euros and the fans responded by snapping them all up. For the first time in a long time, La Riazor will be full on Saturday. At Real Sociedad, there were lines over a kilometre long as fans snapped up the 10 euro tickets for their club’s must win game with fellow strugglers Getafe. In Pamplona, there were similar scenes as 5 euros tickets went in a matter of hours while Real Mallorca were averaging 400 ticket sales per hour for their match with Atlético Madrid. The fever for tickets didn’t just affect the home sides as Real Zaragoza sold all of their 3,500 allocation for the trip to Levante. Indeed the Aragonese club asked for 1,000 extra tickets in order to meet the high demand.

Full stadiums and good atmospheres is exactly what we want to see in football but the question has to be asked, why did the clubs wait so long to lower the prices? In an age where attendances are decreasing and every match is available on TV, why has more not been done to get fans into the stadiums? How can the clubs continue justifying 30, 40 and sometimes 50 euro tickets for the majority of the season? Surely, if the grounds had been fuller during the rest of the campaign and thus the atmosphere had been better, the clubs involved might have gained more points and be higher up the table. Players thrive in good atmospheres, just look at the difference Espanyol’s move out of the Olympic Stadium has made. How many points have the fans in El Molinón or San Mamés helped their teams gain with their vocal support? And it’s not just the players who like good atmospheres, the fans love it too. No-one likes sitting in a half-empty stadium and almost all of our best football memories are from those matches when the stadium was full and noisy. It’s games like those that make us want to come back, not the football on the pitch. Why do all football fans want to attend El Clásico or Boca vs River? For the football or for the atmosphere?

For five of the clubs involved, the last minute offers will appear to have worked and they will survive to fight another day. For one the clubs, it will be too little, too late. However, unless every club starts to look seriously at ticket pricing, we’ll be in the same situation next season. Temporary cheap tickets are not the answer, permanent ones are