Going cashless made the stadium worse for the people it needed most

Card-only grounds cut queue times and quietly removed the occasional fan, the small trader and the child with a tenner.

Card only. Two words on a kiosk, and a set of consequences the operations team never modelled, because the only number on the slide was dwell time at the till.

The operational case is genuine and I will not pretend otherwise. Cash is slow, cash needs counting, cash needs a security van, cash gets stolen by staff, and a card tap moves a queue at roughly twice the rate. Reconciliation drops from a night's work to a report. For a venue running eight kiosks against a fifteen minute half time, that arithmetic wins on its own.

But look at who cash was serving. The grandparent who does not use contactless and now needs a grandchild to buy the tea. The away supporter on a foreign card getting stung on every transaction. The child sent to the kiosk with a note, which is how a lot of us learned that a stadium was a place you could be trusted in. The programme seller outside the ground, the burger van on the corner, the raffle, the collection bucket. That outer ring of small trade is part of what makes an approach to a ground feel like an occasion, and card readers with connection problems have thinned it out.

There is a spending effect too, and clubs are perfectly aware of it. People spend more on a card than on cash because the card does not run out and does not feel like anything. That is a benefit on a revenue line and a cost to a supporter who has budgeted forty pounds for a day out and finds he has spent sixty. A club that is genuinely worried about affordability, and most of them say they are, should notice that it has removed the one instrument that enforced a limit.

The fix is not to reverse the policy. It is to keep one manned cash point per stand, and to stop treating that as a legacy cost. Call it what it is, which is access, in the same category as a hearing loop or a step-free entrance.

My suspicion is that this gets solved eventually by regulation rather than by clubs, and that the clubs will then claim the credit.