For as long as anyone can remember, Tottenham Hotspur have offered half price season tickets for pensioners. No longer. This has been scrapped from the beginning of next season. Those already enjoying the 50 per cent concession in the vain hope they will live long enough to see the team win a trophy again will see their annual discount reduced, in phases, to 25 per cent. And only if they sit in certain allocated sections of the ground. For those of us approaching our golden years, we don’t even get that. The discount has been discontinued.
Older fans are being pushed to one side by a club that seems hell bent on appealing to a younger market
The price of a standard season ticket is going up too, by 6 per cent. It means that in many sections of the ground, the cost has broken through the £1,000 barrier. And that is not even for the most expensive seats. The club maintains this rise is necessary to cover soaring costs. Yet in 2022/23, Spurs had the eighth biggest revenue in world football. Almost all of our direct competitors have won league titles and Champions League trophies in the past couple of decades. We haven’t won the league since 1961, the year before I was born, and have never won the Champions League. We can only boast one league cup win this century.
Fans of other clubs find it baffling that Tottenham can charge some of the highest ticket prices in the Premier League and that we fans are still prepared to pay over the odds for an underperforming team. There’s a simple reason. The club can charge as much as it likes because people are prepared to pay it and people are prepared to pay it because they reckon one day it may just pay off.
Six per cent seems an excessive hike but the club have pointed out that there has only been one increase in season ticket prices in the five years. In that time, it moved to its state-of-the-art stadium, and that previous hike was only 1.5 per cent. The extra £50 or so on admission next season can be made up, you might think, by simply not buying yet another new replica shirt or ditching the expensive match programme.
What is most irksome, however, it that older fans are being pushed to one side by a club that seems hell bent on appealing to a younger market – note the recently introduced appearance in the stands before games of a DJ who acts as if he’s at an Ibiza foam party when he’s actually performing for a few hundred early arrivals and bands playing in the bars after games to keep the young ‘uns in the ground for longer.
Other clubs have various arrangements for their veteran supporters – rather grandly known as ‘legacy fans’ – and none seem to have discarded them so blatantly. Noticeably, Spurs chose Budget day to announce it.
Reducing the discount for seniors would have been bad enough but getting rid of it entirely for those approaching that age sends out the message that they don’t really want so many old people mucking up their demographics. So, after more than 40 years of having a season ticket, and at 61 years old, I can no longer look forward to a price reduction to see me through to my final years of endlessly waiting for something exciting to happen.
In the patronising email accompanying this season’s renewal notice, Tottenham’s PR machine claimed there are now four times as many over-65s at games than there used to be. One assumes that’s partly because the old ground only held 32,000 and the new one 62,000, partly due to an ageing population and partly because the high cost of entrance, travel, programmes, food and drink is easier to afford for cash rich pensioners who have paid off their mortgage than it is young bucks with growing families paying for housing, university fees and the like.
Under Daniel Levy’s stewardship, the club makes money and quite a lot of it, not just from football but from having the stadium used for everything from F1 Kart Racing to NLF American Football and Beyonce concerts. Ending the discounts for large numbers of its more mature supporters will enable the club to make more money while freeing up space for younger fans who are more likely to buy merchandise and stay longer in the ground after the game, which will make them even more.
But it’s an insult to the thousands of regular attendees who have grown old watching this club over the decades. I reckon I’ve visibly aged a few years every time we’ve struggled to break through a low block defence, gone one down after 35 seconds or lost at home to West Ham. As one of the club’s most respected older fans, Alan Fisher, wrote in his Tottenham on my Mind blog:
The decision to limit the number of senior concessions and the amount of the discount is disgraceful, a shameful, offhand disregard of decades of loyalty that impacts longstanding supporters, the people who have been there the longest. Good times and bad. Thick and thin. Thanks for your support. Crap football? We were there. Endless stick from fans of our London rivals? We kept coming. Now pay for it or sod off.
There have already been murmurings of discontent on social media. Supporter groups are set to make representations to the club over this issue which may or may not see some backing down under the guise of ‘we’re listening to you and are prepared to blah blah blah’. But, if they do, we’ll be left asking: why didn’t they consult the fans before making this crass announcement? Perhaps it’s because they can do what they like, we’ll still turn up. It’s the hope that kills.
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