Are Brentford set to become Championship ticket price trailblazers?

We believe: Football should be affordable.

This is the latest Brentford motto. Better than #BigNewAmbitions in my humble opinion.

It’s great that Brentford season ticket prices were held at the same level – with the cheapest adult ticket being £369.

Good video. And good message from the club.

As you know, Beesotted are always behind the concept of affordable football for all. When the club makes positive messages like this, we will push it all day long. As it has long term benefits for the fans.

What’s more, season ticket early bird prices have been held at the the cheap rate for an extra two days –  going up now by £50 or so on 3rd June – to ensure that folk can get their wages in their pockets before shelling out cash for their next season’s football fix.

As much as we understand how difficult it is for the commercial department to balance the need to raise revenue against making football affordable, we will find it interesting to now see how the club now deals with the too expensive £35 on-the-day ticket price that we have been quite vocally critical about this last season- having spoken to a number of people within the club about the rational of charging this price. Brentford sold out less than a dozen matches last season which means that walk up fans in both the home end AND away end were charged £35 in a fair few games.

As away fans, we were less than happy being charged £36 at Sheffield Wednesday so I can imagine the fans visiting us were not too enamoured.

In our humble opinion, the pros (limited additional income .. an extra say 200 people at £5 is £1k .. when you are losing £15m a year that’s chickenfeed) do NOT outweigh the cons.

It makes our club looks like we are one of the most expensive in the league alongside Leeds, Ipswich and Norwich. And it does not tie in with our ‘affordable football’ message.

It also makes it difficult for fans to criticise away teams charging us prices in excess of £30, which we believe is unacceptable.

Plus, if you look at the take-up of on-the-day prices at £35, does it really work? We sold out maybe half a dozen games last season – isn’t the idea at this stage to get bums on seats and try and keep them there for when we move to a bigger stadium?

Hopefully, our ticket prices will become more affordable all around, with fuller stadiums to enjoy the matches in for most of the season.

Above is a summary of what away clubs charged us last season. This will give those fans who are considering picking and choosing their matches next season, the opportunity to plan in advance which clubs they MAY go to and the ones they will give a wide berth to. Especially if cost is their main benchmark.

We will be discussing this and more in this week’s Pride Of West London Podcast. Click below for the raucous the end of season podcast if you missed it.

Billy Grant
@BillytheBee99