Blog: Albion must stop treating supporters like customers

In the context of the recent Premier League TV rights deal from 2016, reportedly worth tens of million pounds of income per year, I'm sure I'm not the only Albion supporter to feel slightly disappointed by the announcement.

By my calculations, the club will yield less than £1m in additional revenue over the next 12 months from season ticket price increases, that's roughly 1% of the club's overall turnover (£87m in 2013/14), even before the new TV deal.

The decision was forced, according to Albion CEO Mark Jenkins, by the "competitive realities" of a Premier League challenge – that extra £1m must be really important, right? Well, not really.

Albion certainly operate on much smaller margins than many of our competitors and undoubtedly need to prudently manage our expenditure, however if the dividing line between success and failure at this level for Albion is as small as the £1m Jenkins suggests, then why was it acceptable for he and Chairman Jeremy Peace to withdraw somewhere in the region of £2m in salary in the 2012/13 season?

Now don't get me wrong, I don't actually begrudge Peace a healthy salary, he's not an oil baron and it's essentially his job, but either the margins are sensitive – in which case a salary 10x more than Newcastle United's highest paid director might be deemed a little excessive – or they're not. It's difficult not to feel there are some double standards being applied by the Albion hierarchy.

Albion's default response has always been that our prices are generally cheaper than the majority of Premier League teams and that's correct, the average season ticket at the Albion is generally lower than at almost every other Premier League team, including the likes of Manchester City and West Ham United, whose policies are being diluted by a handful of lower-end tickets at headline prices.

However that's scarcely likely to be a product of some sort of ethical stance, merely a result of supply and demand – if we had a 2-year waiting list for season tickets, the majority of our support came from Sutton Coldfield and we had a 20,000 capacity stadium, our season tickets wouldn't cost £400.

Also, since when did everybody else's ticket prices become a barometer of rationality? It's every club's kop out argument that another club charges more but it doesn't need to become a competition when gate receipts represent such a minor percentage of each club's income.

If, for example, Albion's announcement had been that adult season tickets were being reduced to between £250 and £350 – which would have made a huge difference to a lot of people – the maximum the club could have lost in revenue is about £2m, probably less given we'd have theoretically sold more. That's an annual turnover of £85m instead of £87m.

Furthermore, if you'd reduced our directors' salaries in line with what Swansea City's take home for example, that revenue deficit becomes closer to £1m, or about 6 months' salary for Nicolas Anelka or Giorgios Samaras. Put simply, ticket price margins aren't the reason we remain competitive or we don't, contrary to what Mark Jenkins implies.

I think most of us reasonably expect some sort of cost of living increase to be applied, which to their credit Albion haven't in the last three seasons. However, next season's increase is as significant as 14% for those in the Birmingham Road and Smethwick Ends.

If the club had applied a cost of living increase every season since 2011/12, the prices would be lower next season that what they actually will be now when, without doubt, the standard of entertainment has decreased over that time.

I've attended both meetings of the inaugural Albion Assembly, much of the rhetoric from Albion centred around repairing what it perceived to be a damaged relationship with the club's support base.

They spoke of improving the atmosphere in the ground, attracting younger supporters – apparently we have the oldest demographic of supporter in the Premier League – enticing disenfranchised supporters back, making us more attractive to the ethnic minorities in the region and filling empty seats.

All of those are very different issues dictated by varying factors however all of them are indisputably influenced to a large degree by ticket cost and, to me, Albion have missed a massive opportunity with these price increases, sacrificing long-term strategy for almost negligible short-term gain.

The club was attracting 30,000 crowds in the third tier of English football less than 25 years ago, it has 245,000 followers on Twitter and got 20,000 applications for tickets for an away fixture at Birmingham last season when cost and circumstances were reasonable. The support is out there.

Sadly, a sizeable majority will be watching next season's matches on TV in pubs across the region or by listening to the radio, rather than attending the game.

If Albion's hierarchy are deadly serious about re-establishing those broken links, developing new ones and realising the club's potential, it has to stop treating its supporters like customers.