Season-ticket holders fear being deprioritised after clubs' ticketing actions this summer
Season-ticket holders in English football say they fear being pushed down the pecking order after Manchester United this summer voided 685 season tickets following a club investigation into secondary-market resales and supporters reported a wider pattern of club measures.
The season ticket remains an intrinsic part of the game: the document described as “the oldest football season ticket in the world” grants its bearer access to every Burnley home game of the 1884-85 season, predating the Football League by four years, and is preserved at Turf Moor. Nearly 150 years after fans started paying up front to watch their team, season tickets continue to be central to English football even as disputes over them have intensified. That longstanding connection is now a source of friction between supporters and clubs as economic and operational pressures prompt changes in access and pricing.
At Old Trafford this summer Manchester United voided 685 season tickets after an investigation found evidence of resale on the secondary market; United said such practices “undermine fair access to tickets for genuine supporters and have no place at Manchester United”. United fan groups again protested against the actions of the club’s ownership, claiming: “The way you treat us is a disgrace.”
Other clubs have taken a range of measures that have inflamed fans: Arsenal have suspended nearly 74,000 club accounts since they began a crackdown in 2024, Chelsea insisted on minimum levels of attendance to retain your ticket for the following season, Bournemouth moved 600 season-ticket holders to accommodate new hospitality seats, and 14 out of the 20 top-flight sides raised their season-ticket prices. A Liverpool supporter appearing on The Overlap at the start of the season argued that a big club would soon try to get rid of season tickets; the clip went viral.
“The claim that clubs want to swap longstanding supporters for one-off tourists is at the heart of many fans’ fears over season tickets and, to a certain extent, it bears out,” supporters and campaign groups say. “There’s a sense from supporter groups at the most successful teams that their club executives and owners don’t fully appreciate season ticket holders and would rather have stadiums full of one-off visitors,” an FSA spokesperson said. “Those who only measure things by the bottom line see season-ticket holders as a group whose matchday spend is lower than the once-a-year fan who will fill their bag at the club shop and pay a bigger premium for their ticket. It’s a shortsighted vision.”
Dominik Schreyer, a professor of sports economics at WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management in Düsseldorf, warns season tickets “come at a cost” for clubs. “In the Premier League, demand is way higher than seat supply,” Schreyer says. “But season ticket holders get discounted seats, right? They are also more likely to be no-shows. When they do come they spend less on food, less on merchandise and they come later to the stadium. They also don’t churn, because these tickets are so scarce that nobody in their right mind would give them away. Every year the average age grows by one because there is no one new getting tickets. So for the clubs, there are a lot of economic problems from their season ticket holders.”
Schreyer also outlines the countervailing value season-ticket holders provide: “What we should not forget is that, in the end, season ticket holders are part of a product that, in the case of the Premier League, is marketed to a global audience,” Schreyer says. “They are creating an atmosphere. Season ticket holders are also used to all the rules and the rituals and the songs, the moments that make this experience very special. So tourists want to come because they want to experience it. If you were to get rid of all the season ticket holders, you would have all the operational and coordination costs of doing it and the product would not be the same any more.” The clubs also benefit from season tickets’ predictability: they “generate a largely predictable amount of revenue that turns up at the same time each year (at the very end of the season where it can be usefully deployed to help with transfer spending limits).” With the average number of season tickets at any given Premier League fixture running at 75% of all tickets, Schreyer says there are ways to broaden access without eliminating season-ticket holders. “In theory, you could give all the seats to season ticket holders and still have a lot of tickets for new fans if you manage it effectively,” Schreyer says. “You just need to change the mechanism in order to get the ticket that is unused on to the secondary market.” He added that clubs’ requests for fans to return unused tickets for resale have often been accompanied by warnings that tickets could be removed if fans do not comply, and that “Clubs don’t communicate that well,” Schreyer says. “I don’t understand why they don’t get fans on board better. You can make things so transparent.”
Disputes over the importance of season tickets may prove to be a harbinger of their demise, but may equally be better understood as a sign of the dysfunction at the top of our biggest clubs.