The oldest football season ticket in the world is a document that promised its bearer entry to every Burnley home game of the 1884-85 season. It predates the Football League by four years, and all of the fixtures it covered were against east Lancashire neighbours. Its legend carried a warning that still resonates: “This card is not transferable. Any member violating this rule will be at once expelled from the club.”
More than 140 years later, the same tension between access and control is playing out at Manchester United. At Old Trafford this summer, 685 season tickets were voided after a club investigation found evidence they had been resold on the secondary market. United said such practices “undermine fair access to tickets for genuine supporters and have no place at Manchester United”. United fan groups again protested against the actions of the club’s ownership, claiming: “The way you treat us is a disgrace.” The episode worsened an already fractious relationship between the club and its supporters.
The season ticket remains a key component in the success of English football, nearly 150 years after fans started paying up front to watch their team. It is also an enduring source of conflict between supporters and clubs, and those tensions appear to be reaching new heights. Arsenal have continued to act against the perceived misuse of tickets, suspending nearly 74,000 club accounts since beginning a crackdown in 2024. This summer Chelsea became the latest club to insist on minimum levels of attendance to retain a ticket for the following season. Bournemouth moved 600 season-ticket holders to accommodate new hospitality seats, while 14 of the 20 top-flight sides raised their season-ticket prices.
Season-ticket holders have long felt undervalued, but there is a growing sense, especially among fans of the biggest clubs, that they are falling further down the pecking order as economic imperatives change. That feeling intensified after a World Cup that seemed precision-tooled to extract as much money as possible from the most devoted fans. One Liverpool supporter crystallised common fears when he appeared on The Overlap at the start of the season and argued that a big club would soon try to get rid of season tickets altogether. The clip went viral.
The Football Supporters’ Association argues that clubs’ present behaviour shows an antagonism towards season-ticket holders. “There’s a sense from supporter groups at the most successful teams that their club executives and owners don’t fully appreciate season ticket holders and would rather have stadiums full of one-off visitors,” an FSA spokesperson said. “Those who only measure things by the bottom line see season-ticket holders as a group whose matchday spend is lower than the once-a-year fan who will fill their bag at the club shop and pay a bigger premium for their ticket. It’s a shortsighted vision.”
The claim that clubs want to swap longstanding supporters for one-off tourists is at the heart of many fans’ fears, and to a certain extent it bears out. Dominik Schreyer, a professor of sports economics at WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management in Düsseldorf, says season tickets “come at a cost” for clubs. “In the Premier League, demand is way higher than seat supply,” Schreyer says. “But season ticket holders get discounted seats, right? They are also more likely to be no-shows. When they do come they spend less on food, less on merchandise and they come later to the stadium. They also don’t churn, because these tickets are so scarce that nobody in their right mind would give them away. Every year the average age grows by one because there is no one new getting tickets. So for the clubs, there are a lot of economic problems from their season ticket holders.”
That, however, is only one side of the ledger. Schreyer points out that season-ticket holders are part of a product that, in the Premier League’s case, is marketed to a global audience. They create the atmosphere, and they are used to the rules, rituals and songs that make the experience special. Tourists want to come because they want to experience that. If clubs were to get rid of all season-ticket holders, they would face operational and coordination costs and the product would not be the same. Season tickets also generate a largely predictable amount of revenue that arrives at the same time each year, at the very end of the season, where it can be usefully deployed to help with transfer spending limits. For most clubs, replacing season-ticket holders with one-off fans would not be feasible even if they wanted to.
With the average number of season tickets at any given Premier League fixture running at 75% of all tickets, there is a question of whether that number should be set in stone and whether access could be broadened without killing off part of what made matches great. “In theory, you could give all the seats to season ticket holders and still have a lot of tickets for new fans if you manage it effectively,” Schreyer says. “You just need to change the mechanism in order to get the ticket that is unused on to the secondary market.” This is already happening at a number of clubs, with fans being asked to return their tickets for resale if they are not being used. But those requests have often come with warnings that tickets could be removed should fans not comply. Some of the tension around season tickets is simply because clubs are not talking clearly or frequently enough with fans. “Clubs don’t communicate that well,” Schreyer says. “I don’t understand why they don’t get fans on board better. You can make things so transparent.”
The picture across the Premier League is not uniform. Brentford raised prices for the first time in five years but faced minimal pushback. Brighton’s 3% rise was backed by the fan advisory board. Chelsea and Tottenham froze prices but still found themselves at odds with their fanbase. The season ticket is a device as old as the game itself, but it has grown to become a symbol of the connection between fanbases and clubs. Disputes over the importance of season tickets may prove to be a harbinger of their demise, but they may equally be better understood as a sign of the dysfunction at the top of the biggest clubs.