Leeds United adopt sensible pricing plan, but still must get their sums right - YEP 16/3/13

By Phil Hay
Leeds United first put a firework up the backside of season-ticket prices in 2005. Later that summer the club got in touch to tell the YEP that income from sales had reached £4.5m with a further £1m guaranteed in credit payments.
It prompted a very obvious question: how many season tickets had been sold? No comment. And with that you realised that a steep hike in prices had hacked away at the existing group of holders, as if there was any doubt that it would. Over time, 17,000 ran closer to 10,000 and the battle lines were drawn.
Before the contentious rises, adult holders were charged a minimum of £330 and an average of between £400 and £450. Allowing for inflation, the reduced prices announced by Leeds on Thursday are almost in line with pre-Ken Bates attitudes. If you’re over 21 and yet to receive a bus pass, you’ll pay an average of £491. That’s £21 a game.
This is sensible pricing in action and not before time; a genuine attempt to find the middle ground between revenue and inclusion. United’s satisfaction with gate receipts of £5.5m in 2005 said it all – a makeweight in their eyes for the thousands of fans who burnt season tickets in droves. And so it went on. Certain seats in Elland Road’s East Stand cost £726 for the 2006-07 season. Premiership prices for relegation and administration.
It was not only the sheer expense that raised hackles. On top of that was the absence of concessionary tickets in either the East or West Stands, out with the Family Area and the discrepancies between renewal prices and those set for new applicants. If you renewed in the lower East Stand last season you paid £633. If you applied for a new ticket, you paid £711. Or more likely, you didn’t. It reflects the fact that tickets are no longer selling.
The revision of United’s pricing structure for next season has addressed many of those issues. It cut basic costs and applied a more reasonable levy to new applications. There’s a difference between rewarding loyalty and hammering people who want to join the throng. The introduction of a young adult category helps those who, by and large, are as pushed for money as under-16s and an age group with decades of attendance in them. It is not that tickets for Elland Road have become cheap overnight but they are closer to the going rate and far more accessible.
After two months of delicate courtship, this is GFH Capital’s first real overture to the supporters of the club it bought in December. Watch Leeds 4 Less, Paint It White, official Twitter and Facebook pages – none of that washes like an announcement which tackles a core concern. Lower prices are a stripe on the company’s arm but also a feather in the cap of the staff at Elland Road who pieced the strategy together.
There was no standard reduction of 10 per cent across the board on Thursday. The cuts were substantial, varied and exact, up to a maximum of 32.9 per cent. United said the changes stemmed from discussions at their Regional Members Conference in November 2011 which implies that the club are seeing sense in what they’re hearing.
Leeds being Leeds, Thursday’s announcement did not pass without complication. The revelation from club director Salem Patel that the first £3.3m raised from season ticket sales would go directly to Ticketus, the firm which loaned United £5m for the redevelopment of the East Stand in 2011, reminded us of how much there is to sort out. Kudos to Patel for his honesty but mentioning Ticketus was an odd way of nurturing optimism for next season.
Already you wonder how much money Leeds will have to throw at their squad.
Season ticket uptake is not exclusive of those factors. Thursday’s reductions were widely appreciated but Leeds will fight the same fight in 12 months’ time if they drift through next season as they’ve drifted through this. Some people struggle to afford tickets in the first place; others don’t see value in what they’re paying to see. GFH Capital cannot be all things to all men but falling attendances are a multi-track problem. The standard of football matters.
There was criticism of comments this week by chief executive Shaun Harvey, saying “the level of fans’ response will form an integral part of our budgeting process for the squad next season”. It sounded like a threat, not least because of the payment due to Ticketus for an expensive development carried out on his watch, but Harvey was saying it as it is.
Prices are down and so will be United’s income unless sales go up. Progress relies on this move paying off.
Quid pro quo.

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