Matt Maher: Costly price hikes are just small change in FFP fight

No owners, no matter the sport, should ever be in that position.

Much as Villa supporters should be grateful to have ambitious owners, they still have every right to be angry at how they are being ripped off with regard to Champions League ticket pricing. Sawiris and Edens, the men ultimately at the helm, need to hear it.

The above point feels an important one to make, after a week in which Villa’s fanbase has wrestled with the question of precisely what to do with the anger and frustration generated by prices which the vast majority agree are far too high by any measure.

Tomorrow’s Premier League match with Everton would appear the obvious opportunity to vent but even at the time of writing, it remains unclear just what form any protest will take.

A common concern circulated on social media has been on avoiding something which might disrupt Unai Emery and his team. By the same token, it feels like it is already well past the point where holding up cards is going to make much of a difference.

The nuclear option of a boycott is already off the table, for now. Within 96 hours of tickets for next month’s match against Bayern Munich going on sale, they were sold out, albeit aided by a scheme which allowed season ticket holders to sign up in advance for Champions League tickets, before they knew the price.

Confirmation of the sell-out was accompanied by a statement from Chris Heck, Villa’s president of business operations, who said he “understood” supporter frustrations before trying to excuse charging some fans nearly £100 to attend on the need to raise revenues to help the club comply with financial fair play rules.

The truth of how little raising ticket prices matters when it comes to the FFP equation has been laid bare countless times in this space, yet seeing as Heck and others are intent on still trying to peddle the myth, we had better do so again.

We’ll keep the numbers simple, mainly because the range of categories and prices in Villa’s ticketing system means the club alone know precisely how much extra cash they will generate.

But let’s suppose, just for argument’s sake, they had gone even further than they actually did and stuck an extra £30 on every ticket, compared to the category A prices for Premier League fixtures.

For 38,000 sold, that would add up to £1.14million extra. Even multiplied by four, to take in account every group stage fixture, the additional money would still come nowhere close to paying off the salary of Villa’s top earner, Emi Martinez.

When you consider the club’s revenues for the 2022-23 season were more than £220million, it does not require a degree in accountancy to realise in the grand scheme of things cash made from the price hikes is mere pocket change from the club’s perspective.

And yet for the benefit of such a relatively small amount, Villa are taking a big risk.

The club should not be fooled into thinking just because supporters have paid up, they are satisfied. Many will have handed over their cash through gritted teeth and the whole episode has felt an unnecessary means of antagonising the fanbase.

That is never clever, even at a time when the big picture seems so rosy. Just ask Martin O’Neill, who never recovered from the 2009 Moscow surrender, which took place right at the moment he appeared at the peak of his powers.

Supporters have long memories and Villa’s hierarchy must now hope Emery keeps on delivering results or the bitterness of the past week will quickly resurface. The Spaniard is undoubtedly Villa’s best manager since Ron Saunders but for more than a century this has not been a club with a track record of maintaining success.

Heck knows he has become the focal point for the “frustration” of which he speaks and trying to place the blame for the price rises on FFP will have done nothing to improve his standing. The American really would have been better served saying nothing at all.

Yet it would also be naive to think the price rises did not go through with the blessing of the owners, in particular the increasingly hands-on Sawiris.

After all, the cost of going to Villa Park was already rising considerably before Heck’s appointment in May last year and an easily overlooked part of the issue is Villa supporters have been dealing with significant increases for several years.

For the 2021-22 season, the first in which fans were allowed back into stadiums, the cheapest adult season ticket at Villa Park was £370. Just three years later, it is £640, an increase of more than 70 per cent.

When the club first put prices up in 2022, it came after years of price freezes. A year later, a further rise of more than 10 per cent was down to “benchmarking” against top-eight clubs, while this year’s five per cent increase on adult season tickets (note: concessionary prices went up by considerably more) was blamed on PSR.

The difference now, of course, is Villa actually have some success to sell but having ramped up prices when they were still in mid-table, they have been left with nowhere to go. This year’s category A prices, for example, already felt far too high. Some supporters will pay more than £70 to watch next week’s visit of Wolves from the Holte End.

Ultimately, the question of what to do can only be answered by the fans. They are the ones who are faced with paying the money to watch their club.

That last emphasis is important. It is their club. They should never be afraid to make their voices heard.