A club's real ticket price is set on the resale market, not at the box office

Dynamic pricing did not create the secondary market; it was a slow admission that the secondary market had been pricing tickets all along.

Watch what happens the hour a big fixture goes on general sale. The club price sits there, fixed, printed months earlier by someone guessing at demand. Within minutes there is a second price, set by thousands of people who now know exactly how the season has gone, who is fit, and whether the match decides anything. The second price is the true one. The first is a historical document.

Clubs spent two decades pretending otherwise, and then started copying it.

Dynamic pricing is usually explained to supporters as a way of making cheap seats cheaper on quiet nights. Sometimes it does. Mostly it is a club deciding it would rather capture the resale margin itself than watch a broker do it. That is a defensible commercial position. It is not the position stated in the press release, and the gap between the two is why the policy lands so badly with people who have held the same seat for thirty years.

The mechanism matters here. A ticket is a perishable good with a hard expiry and almost no marginal cost, which is the textbook case for variable pricing. Airlines do it. Hotels do it. The difference is that nobody has a hereditary emotional claim on seat 14C of a Tuesday flight. Supporters do, and a pricing model that treats a derby seat as inventory is going to keep colliding with people who treat it as a place they belong.

I would draw the line somewhere specific. Price the neutral, the casual and the corporate however the market will bear. Ring-fence the renewing season ticket and the away allocation at a fixed number, and accept the lost margin as the cost of having a crowd rather than an audience.

The clubs that get this wrong tend to get it wrong in one direction. They apply the model to the loudest, most habitual part of the ground, because that is where demand is most reliable, which is exactly backwards. Reliable demand is the thing you protect, not the thing you squeeze.

There is a tell for whether a club has thought about this. Look at whether it operates an official resale exchange with a price cap, or one without. A cap says the club still thinks a ticket has a face value. No cap says it has quietly agreed that the face value was always a suggestion.