Football will eat itself

Harry B on the morality of Aston Villa's UCL pricing.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? (Pretty sure it's the egg, but I can't be bothered checking.) And the issue that I'm pondering as I see the Aston Villa ticket prices for their four Champions League games is whether the top clubs are fleecing their fans because that's what they do, or the top clubs are fleecing their fans because they need to pay astronomical wages to some very average players.

Famously, the players in the '60s, '70s, 80’s and earlier lived cheek by jowl with supporters. They got on buses and trains with supporters, and by the mid '80s were signing contracts that included cars, such as a Ford Capri, or for the family man, a Ford Mondeo. But this was at a time when football stadiums were decrepit and ramshackled. When tickets were £1.50 for adults and 50 pence for kids, when the average attendance at Celtic Park was 18,000, and when 96 Liverpool supporters lost their lives because nobody cared about the conditions of the stadia.

The Hillsborough disaster and others around that time (such as the Bradford fire) showed that dilapidated stadiums could no longer be tolerated. In the years prior to Hillsborough, the only acquiescence to improved safety measures at football grounds that had been constructed 70/80 years previously, was the construction of fences. It was a safety measure akin to the Romans building Hadrian's wall to protect them from the barbarians.

The Hillsborough disaster and the subsequent Taylor Report necessitated the construction of all-seater stadium by football clubs. And this meant the financial model had to be reviewed and reconsidered because someone had to pay for these new stadia.

One of the first thing that was introduced was season books.

At a club like Celtic, season books had always existed, but sometimes they appeared to be more of an inconvenience for the club masters than any understanding of business sense, with season books for the terracing being available and then dropped on a regular basis. The introduction of season books, and the encouragement of supporters to sign up to these on a mass scale, provided guaranteed revenue for football clubs and allowed proper budgeting, and therefore, appropriate financing of these new all-seater stadia. But of course, if people are paying more money for the stadia, it changes the profile of the type of person who is attending football. At the same time as that profile of football attendees started to change, multichannel broadcasters arrived in the UK, with specialised sports channels, and as per the United States, these specialised sports channels needed to fill their airwaves.

A fledgling subscription-based TV model needs a headline-grabbing sport to attract the subscribers and Sky famously, in the words of Alan Sugar, blew the terrestrial providers out of the water with their bid. We therefore had, in a short period of time, a transformation in the standard of facilities, an increase in revenue to clubs and a massive increase in revenue to clubs from TV who needed sport - and in Britain the preeminent sport that will get viewers is football. This is where the downward spiral to football eating itself started.

With increased revenue, the elite clubs wanted to buy the best players to secure their place in the top flight and secure this increased revenue, and this concentration of elite players also concentrated supporters around the elite clubs, and so on. Very quickly the elite players realised that they were the star attraction of the show and, understandably, wanted their share of the money and so the elite clubs started giving away the money to the elite players. But in order to remain an elite club, you needed to have the best elite players, and the way to secure the best of the elite players was to pay them more money than the other club.

This meant that you needed to generate more revenue, which meant putting ticket prices up, and it also meant having to get more money off the TV producers. But as the TV producers wanted more money, they wanted it taking place in attractive stadiums. And this drives the elite clubs to secure even more of the elite players, and the elite players realised that they are the ticket for the elite clubs. They employed agents to ensure that they got ,what they saw, as their fair share of this money. This spiral has continued to the point where the elite league money and the elite Champions League money was not enough for some elite clubs, and they tried to set up a super league to secure even more of the elite money. But even more of the elite money would've gone to the elite players and the other elite clubs in transfer fees, requiring these clubs to generate even more money from the elite league, which is then demanded in even more greater amounts by the elite players.

Whilst the Super League didn't happen, we still have this spiral of money grabbing from the elite clubs to feed the voracious appetite of the elite players. UEFA's system to prevent the Super League has been a combination of a revamping of the European competitions to give the elite clubs more games against each other and the introduction of new financial sustainability regulations. On the surface these rules are laudable andd aimed at preventing a David Murray at Rangers. In reality, FSR is locking in the elite clubs to being the elites and locking the rest out. For example, if one of us won the £100million pound plus Euro lottery and decided to buy (eg) Hibs, we couldn't set aside £60m to £70m of our winnings to blow on turning Hibs into a team that could win the Scottish premiership and compete in the Europa League.

What we now see in many leagues, but England is the worst, is the grotesque position of Aston Villa, in the world's richest league, generating more revenues than Doug Ellis could have dreamed of - qualifying for the Champions League and charging their supporters upwards of £75 a game.

I understand a club like Celtic looking enviously at how much people pay for a concert at the Hydro and trying to match across Champions League football, which is so patently at a level above the standard that's being achieved in the SPFL, and pricing accordingly. However, Aston Villa play in the world's richest league, and they are going to rip off their own fan base as a reward to the fans for sticking with them in the dark times, now that they've reached the elite competition of European football again. Is this being done because without this revenue, they can’t afford the players and they will walk, or are clubs like Villa so money obsessed because this is just what they do?

Football is eating itself. It is feeding the insatiable dog of elite player's egos, and where this will end up, nobody knows.