Football costs, a Get it up You from Kilmarnock and Aberdeen giving excuses to fail

Yesterday’s The Price of Football BBC article was fascinating. Celtic, not surprisingly, have the most expensive season ticket in Scotland at £559. That’s around the midway mark for English Championship clubs, and a lower top price than only Sunderland and West Brom in the English Premier League.

Our cheapest adult season tickets, costing £337, is among a group of Premiership clubs bookended by Hearts  and Kilmarnock (£280), and Hamilton Accies (£350). Inverness are an outlier, with a season ticket costing only £200.

Some of the prices in the English Premier League are astonishing Arsenal tickets cost between £1,014 and £2013 – and that’s for standard seats. Football is expensive everywhere, but in London in particular. The cheapest ticket at Arsenal, Chelsea (£750), Spurs (£765) and West Ham (£617) is matched only by Liverpool (£710).

Manchester City, with their petrodollars and newly enlarged stadium offer £299 tickets. Good value, but the most obvious question from reading the EPL stats is why, with all that TV and sponsorship money reducing match-ticket income to a tiny percentage of the pot, don’t they bring prices down further- like City, Stoke (£294) and Sunderland (£190).

The BBC also surveyed the price of tea, shirts, programmes and pies. One thing I checked for but couldn’t find, is the price all clubs in British and Irish football charge visiting Celtic fans – compared to the standard price they charge all other visiting fans.

Only Kilmarnock have one tariff for all home and away fans, apart from Celtic fans; and another, higher, ticket price for Celtic fans. You may think the people at Kilmarnock would be embarrassed by this. They should be, but I suspect they couldn’t care less. They don’t care what you think of them, and they are taking you for mugs…….  Mugs.  Think about that for a moment.

I like Aberdeen and hope they do well.  Their success is good for Scottish football, but you can see the cracks opening up on what was a very promising season only a few weeks ago.  Yesterday’s statement from the club, asserting that their manager would not be leaving, cut to the heart of the matter.  Speculation is part of football.  Clubs do themselves no favours by getting dragged into official comments over such issues.  Better to brief one or two people off the record, let them quell the chatter.

Instead Aberdeen grandstanded with this fatal mistake, “we would question the motivation of those individuals looking to unsettle the club”.  So it’s unsettling.  There you have it.  The players, and manager, have an excuse ahead of tomorrow night’s game.

Give players an excuse to fail and they will often grab it with both hands.