Should football matches be free to watch?

This idea only just sprang to my brain a moment ago so not thought it through fully yet. 

Anyway would it be possible for a club or ALL clubs too function whilst not having an entry fee for games? And would people be more poor less likely to attend? 

Please don't say that it can't be done because of player wages because really they should come down in line with what clubs can afford not the other way around... 

Are there any advantages to free games other than the direct saving to each supporter? Are there other ways to make a profit? And would it lead to higher attendance overall? 

And if not free entry then what about a flat rate per division using a centrally decided "fair price". And by fair I mean more reasonable than we could realistically imagine right now.  £10 for premier league games.  £7 Championship and so on.

Without ticket sales the vast majority of clubs outside of the Premier League would not exist. There should be a maximum ticket price though. The twenty's plenty campaign sounds about right.

I can watch every football , boxing, box office, every channel in the world, 3 pm kickoffs, you name it it's free for me on my 55 inch T.V.

Ticket prices should fall by £10 if the team loses. Then rise to the normal price if they win, and so on

Why stop there? We all have to eat don't we so why not have free food in restaurants? 
I don't like paying the ridiculous prices they charge at the cinema so that should certainly be free.
I mean those film makers may spend £300 gazillion to make Star Wars but why should we pay for it?
If I want to pay £2 to watch a film they should cut their budget accordingly and even if the Death Star is 3 shopping trolleys welded together shot on an I-phone at least the price would be about right.
Obviously we'd have to raise taxes to 80% to pay for everything but in principle we could have most things for free if we only put our minds to it.

First I think there needs to be a radical shake up in how TV money is distributed. For example in the USA the Major Leagues for Baseball, American Football and Soccer all work the same way. TV money is divided equally between EVERY club in the relevant leagues. It doesn't matter who's top or bottom, who has more matches shown etc, all the clubs are paid exactly the same from a central pot organised by the league itself who collectively bargain on their game's behalf. If that happened then gate receipts would no longer be the absolute necessity they are now and ticket prices could fall (as they have done in America) which leads to an increase in other spending (eg food/drink/merchandise) that more than offsets the lost revenue due to larger numbers of full seats. However it needs to start with the TV money to really work because the smaller clubs in particular need that guaranteed income before they can risk the rest.

I wouldn't make entry free but I would make it cheaper, say a fiver for a child and other concessions (OAP, student etc) and ten quid for adults.

That's the sort of thing I mean Lpp. And lusty,I am just wondering if there is another business model that would work for football which might not work for other businesses.

Yes - cycling proves you can provide a sport to the general spectators for free.

Basically someone gets a group of riders together and find a sponsor to pay for the wages and kit.

Events are arranged and prize money is on offer.

The prize money is funded by selling TV rights and advertising.

So anyone could go down to the local cycling event and watch it for free. The Tour de France for instance is free to watch live at the side of the road.

There is certainly nothing to stop Premier League teams throwing open their grounds for free because something like 95% of the clubs income comes from Sky.

Sluffy wrote:There is certainly nothing to stop Premier League teams throwing open their grounds for free because something like 95% of the clubs income comes from Sky.

Apart from say a £50/60 million wage bill, £20 million transfer spend and £10 million in agents fees.

I would have thought that being a Bolton fan you would know that a Premier League club needs all the money it can get if it doesn't have (usually foreign) a very wealthy backer.

Copper Dragon wrote:

Sluffy wrote:There is certainly nothing to stop Premier League teams throwing open their grounds for free because something like 95% of the clubs income comes from Sky.

Apart from say a £50/60 million wage bill, £20 million transfer spend and £10 million in agents fees.

I would have thought that being a Bolton fan you would know that a Premier League club needs all the money it can get if it doesn't have (usually foreign) a very wealthy backer.

The facts are still that something like 95% of a Premier League clubs revenue comes from Sky.

I didn't say that in these (or indeed the old days too) that clubs WOULD allow fans in for free but I'm sure any well run club could throw open the gates now and again for free without making a loss if they had a mind too.

And also Lusty. 
If all clubs lowered the amount they pay players universally then the players wouldn't be any worse.  Reduce Rooney to 20k a week  instead off 100k per week,and reduce all other players wages in a similar way, its not like they are going to quit football and work in a shop is it?

Utd spent 240 million on wages last year on the first team. 
They took 109 million in gate receipts and season tickets. 

They could easily swallow the gate money if the league said there was a 100 million wage cap  for example.

Youve already reduced rooneys wages from 300k to 100k in your post biggie

Sluffy wrote:
The facts are still that something like 95% of a Premier League clubs revenue comes from Sky.

I didn't say that in these (or indeed the old days too) that clubs WOULD allow fans in for free but I'm sure any well run club could throw open the gates now and again for free without making a loss if they had a mind too.

Nearly every Premier League club over a financial year makes a loss Sluffy. It's sustainable if you can stay in that league or you have a very wealthy backer.

The twenty is plenty is a start, but if you think about it like an hour an half of 'entertainment' then twenty is still too much.

We are ripped off in this country in everything so it's nothing new.

Biggie wrote:I am just wondering if there is another business model that would work for football which might not work for other businesses.

Possibly, but we're not starting with a blank canvas and the biggest obstacle would be to overcome the existing vested interest and culture and you just need to look at the problems FIFA have to realise how difficult change management is in the sector.
The redistribution of TV income is tricky as you'd be asking the Manures of this world to give up their advantage in the knowledge that they would argue they provide the bulk of the entertainment and have a bigger fanbase and therefore deserve a bigger slice of the pie (and ignore the fact that they have the bigger fanbase as a result of the bigger slice albeit indirectly)


The Bundesliga finance model seems to work well and that could be adopted if there was a will. In essence corporations legally can't own more than 49% of a club but despite that clubs forge very close ties with big business and agree corporate tie-ins with multiple "partners" - effectively sponsors buy a small share of the club. The theory is that this model reduces excessive risk-taking and focuses on long term vision and planning.
However it would mean an end to clubs dependency on sugar daddies like Sheikh Mansour or Abramovich (or ED for that matter) and prising their playthings away from them may prove impossible.

So I think there is a football-specific business model that would improve sustainability and lead to reduced costs for the fans* but the barrier to change is the vested interest in the current model.

* Season ticket for Bayern Munich costs just over £100! Despite that Bayern's income is massive and that's because they get more fans through the door and they spend more on other stuff.

Sluffy wrote:Yes - cycling proves you can provide a sport to the general spectators for free.

Basically someone gets a group of riders together and find a sponsor to pay for the wages and kit.

Events are arranged and prize money is on offer.

The prize money is funded by selling TV rights and advertising.

So anyone could go down to the local cycling event and watch it for free.  The Tour de France for instance is free to watch live at the side of the road.

There is certainly nothing to stop Premier League teams throwing open their grounds for free because something like 95% of the clubs income comes from Sky.

I martialled my first cycling event - a 12 hour around the Trough of Bowland organised by my granddad - when I was 10 and of course I got paid nothing for it. One of the nice things about cycling is that it isn't a comparable sport as the costs are miniscule compared to football. They don't pay for stadia and they put the responsibility for crowd control and safety on to the public sector supplemented with volunteers who do the martialling, lead/follow driving, traffic control, signage and course set up etc. Many major cycling events even have an entry fee where the participants pay to compete rather than the other way round. It's a different ballgame so to speak and I don't think professional football can learn much from it. After all you can go to the park and play or watch football for free. But as soon as a stadium is involved there is a whole bunch of legislation that brings unavoidable costs with it.

Cycling at the top level is not cheap - top riders are on salaries of £3 million per year.

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They may not have stadiums to maintain but then all major teams have bases and training camps. They are also 'world' teams and have to have several squads flying all over the world through the season - which is basically 9 months long.

I'm not saying the costs are bigger than many clubs but the expenses are certainly not miniscule as you seem to have overlooked.

I never said football had anything to learn from cycling, merely answered Biggies question if sport 'could' be free to watch - cycling most certainly is.

It is a completely different model from any other sport I am aware of - but has been going for over 100 years and has mass following on the continent even if not by most British sport fans.

They most be doing something right otherwise it would have packed in years ago.

The reason it won't ever happen, as already suggested by Lusty, is that the people running the game in England (and it's England we're talking about here, not Britain) have far too much invested financially to ever agree to a radical overhaul.

Sky TV, The Premier League and the clubs involved all make far too much money with the present model to even consider changing it to benefit your average, money-paying fan.

Sky throw millions at the English game because they get far more back in return through TV subscriptions.

And they do this by flogging this myth that it's the best league in the world and it attracts the best players as a result.

But that's all bollocks, isn't it?

It's a cash rich environment which attracts players who want to earn £200 k a week, but they're not necessarily the best out there.

Look at Costa - He was being lauded as some football God when he first arrived in England bit he's just a nasty thug with an average talent as it turns out.

But people keep falling for it, so the wheel keeps turning. 

I've been banging on about this for donkey's years but it will never change and it's also the reason England will never win a major tournament.

Breadman wrote:The reason it won't ever happen, as already suggested by Lusty, is that the people running the game in England (and it's England we're talking about here, not Britain) have far too much invested financially to ever agree to a radical overhaul.

Sky TV, The Premier League and the clubs involved all make far too much money with the present model to even consider changing it to benefit your average, money-paying fan.

Sky throw millions at the English game because they get far more back in return through TV subscriptions.

And they do this by flogging this myth that it's the best league in the world and it attracts the best players as a result.

But that's all bollocks, isn't it?

It's a cash rich environment which attracts players who want to earn £200 k a week, but they're not necessarily the best out there.

Look at Costa - He was being lauded as some football God when he first arrived in England bit he's just a nasty thug with an average talent as it turns out.

But people keep falling for it, so the wheel keeps turning. 

I've been banging on about this for donkey's years but it will never change and it's also the reason England will never win a major tournament.

The sooner the English football fans realises it is they that have been hijacked and not just the teams the quicker things will change re. pricing structures - best league in the world? -absolute bollocks! most exiting? - debatable, but without the atmosphere created by fans can you imagine the 'product' that Sky et al would have to sell? UTD v Liverpool, Arsenal -Tottenham etc. etc. etc with out fans - no-one would subscribe to that for long BUT and here's the rub - we would have to have a mass organised boycott of the games and seeing as we cant even organise a Bolton fans trust/organisation without loads of bickering and in-fighting, it aint gonna happen is it? - divide and rule - always has been the name of the game. The fans have it within themselves to change things if only they realised it collectively.

Fully agree Alf but the problem is there's an entire generation of fans out there now who think football started in 1992 with Sky.

They're so absorbed in all the hype and bullshit that they can't step back and see it for what it is.

It honestly wouldn't bother me if the Premier League folded tomorrow and all the foreign mercenaries buggered off to Russia or Kuwait in search of their next pay-day and we were left watching English teams having to employ and develop British talent like they used to.

And who knows, we might actually see some decent talent filter through to the national team again.

I remember Italia 90 when we got to the semi-finals and missed out by a whisker.

That was 2 years before Sky "revolutionised" English football and we've been nowhere near repeating (even that moderate) success ever since.

Christ, we couldn't even win Euro 96 and that was played in England.

But therein lies another problem with modern fans - the majority don't care about the national team because Sky put their interests above that of the FA, so England doing well isn't a priority for them.

And could that be linked to the fact that Sky aren't allowed to show England games by any chance...?

You are right that it has to come from the fans en mass all at once.  Perhaps it needs some catalizing event. 
It had happened in music to some degree and eventually I think it will lead to an overall lower income even for the top artists.  I think the bubble burst or will do soon.  People don't want to pay 3 to 5v quid for a single and then 15 to 20 for an album when there are other options.