The price of watching elite sport in Britain has risen sharply through the 2020s, and the figures for 2027 lay out the scale of the change. A single adult wanting a day of the Ashes at Edgbaston in Birmingham will pay at least £115, unless they are an Edgbaston member. A standard seat at the Wimbledon singles finals starts at £255. General admission to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on raceday begins at £289. Yet attendances across the majority of sports remain as strong as ever.
The Ashes rise is particularly stark. The last time Edgbaston hosted a Test, in 2023, the minimum price was £65 — a jump of £50 to £115 in four years. Admission at other venues, including The Oval, is even higher. By contrast, when the Ashes were last played in Australia, some seats at all five venues were sold to fans for between £16 and £22.
Wimbledon’s most expensive standard seat for both the men’s and women’s singles finals next year will be £400, £50 more than in 2026 and more than double the cost in 2017. Even so, the tournament remains the cheapest of the four Grand Slams. A Centre Court ticket for the middle Saturday now costs at least £130.
Elsewhere, general admission for Grand Prix Sunday at Silverstone has risen to £289 from £189 in 2021, while the cheapest allocated seat now costs at least £609, up from £276 five years ago. General admission to the 2027 Ryder Cup at Adare Manor in the Republic of Ireland will cost €499 (£434), compared with up to €260 (£220) in Italy in 2023. Fans paid £150 to attend a day of The Open at Royal Birkdale this year, against £95 at St Andrews in 2022. FA Cup final prices ranged from £50 to £285 in 2026, compared with £50 to £120 in 2016.
The increases have not passed quietly. Lee Hanlon, an England cricket fan who lives close to Edgbaston, has decided against attending next summer’s Ashes because of the price rise. “It’s just ludicrous,” he said. “I’m angry. It seems like a lot of the normal cricket fans have been priced out. It seems like just people with money are going now. The increase is just too much. I find it upsetting.” In a poll on the BBC Sport website, 95% of respondents voted that tickets for the 2027 Ashes were too expensive.
Organisers argue the prices reflect wider pressures. An Edgbaston spokesperson said the venue’s entry-level ticket prices roughly match inflation compared with the last time Australia visited in 2023, adding that, like the rest of the country, it is battling increased costs and trying to manage them where it can. Putting on a major event involves utilities, staffing, technology, insurance and marketing. Mark Darbon, chief executive of the R&A, which operates golf’s Open Championship, frames the shift in terms of what spectators now value. “We exist in an experience economy — we have definitely seen a subtle shift in the value people are placing on belonging, on the atmosphere you can be part of when you attend a live experience,” he said. “So when we set our prices we start by looking at some of the other major sporting events and benchmark ourselves, on price and value for money, by looking at what others are delivering.”
Darbon also spelled out the cost side of the equation. Ticketing revenue generates less than 20% of the R&A’s total revenue from The Open, he said, while hosting the championship now costs 25% more than it did five or six years ago — potentially £10-12m in incremental costs. “We have to cover those costs,” he said. The Open does offer half-price tickets for attendees aged 16-24 and free tickets for children.
A growing share of hospitality ticketing at prestige events and new venues can also push up the cost of standard seats. “We are seeing more and more regular people willing to pay for a special experience at sport,” said Richard Flint, chairman of Seat Unique, an online platform specialising in hospitality and VIP ticketing. He said corporate boxes are increasingly being broken down into individual seats, so it is less about a group of colleagues and more about a couple or four people going together. Teams and leagues undeniably want to grow revenue from that demand, he added, but the money can help fund a new stadium or stand — a benefit, he argues, to the everyday fan.
For supporters watching from home, the barrier is the breadth of subscriptions rather than a single ticket. A football fan in the UK must subscribe to Sky Sports, TNT Sports, Amazon Prime and Premier Sports to watch all matches across the Premier League, Champions League and Scottish Premiership, and must also pay for an annual TV licence to watch matches shown on the BBC and ITV. Other sports can require even more subscriptions and more money.
“It certainly helps when you can say to a fan that they only need to buy one subscription to see everything in one sport,” said Pete Oliver, CEO of growth markets for the streaming service DAZN. “If a sport is very fragmented, we would say it’s not going to be a great proposition for the fan, and it’s probably not going to be a great commercial prospect for us.” He expects entertainment subscription costs to rise over time, citing natural inflation in the market, competition for sports rights, athletes wanting to be paid more, and leagues taking the best offer available. Money from TV rights has plateaued to an extent in recent years in some competitions, including the Premier League, but fans are still being charged more to watch.
The long-term picture worries some in the industry. Pierre Maes, an author and consultant in sports media rights, believes fans who avoid illegal solutions will pay more in the short term, but that a ceiling has been reached. “We know that higher prices and more fragmentation leads to more piracy,” he said, adding that people seem to have no moral obstacle to it. He compares the situation to the music industry’s struggle and argues there is no other path in the long term than a “Spotify of sports” — otherwise, he warns, sports will lose their fans and their attention.
The subject is examined in a new BBC Radio 5 Live programme, The Price of Our Sport.