Clubs price tickets worse than touts do, and choose to

A match that sells out in eleven minutes was underpriced, and everyone involved knows exactly why it was.

A sold-out match is a pricing mistake with excellent public relations.

If a ticket clears the primary market in eleven minutes and then trades on a resale site for four times face value, the club has handed a large sum of money to strangers. That is not a controversial statement in any other industry. Airlines and hotels fixed this decades ago with pricing that moves by the hour and nobody writes angry columns about it.

Sport mostly refuses, and I think the refusal is defensible, which is why the topic is more interesting than it looks.

The argument for holding prices low is that a football crowd is not a set of customers, it is a component of the product. The person who has stood in the same spot for eighteen years generates atmosphere, buys merchandise, brings a child who becomes a season ticket holder in 2041, and turns up in the rain in a cup tie against nobody. Dynamic pricing systematically replaces that person with whoever has the most disposable income on the day, and the second group does not sing.

So clubs run a deliberately inefficient market and use non-price rationing instead: loyalty points, membership tiers, ballots, purchase histories. Those systems are attempts to allocate scarce seats by commitment rather than by wallet. When they work, they are a defensible piece of social engineering. When they are badly built, they are worse than an auction, because points accumulate to people who bought a lot of tickets in the past and the queue becomes hereditary.

What I object to is the halfway house most clubs occupy. They keep face value low for the emotional argument, then quietly capture the difference elsewhere: category pricing that reclassifies the big matches, membership fees required to enter a ballot, hospitality packages that bypass the queue entirely, and an official resale platform on which the club takes a commission from its own supporters trading with each other.

That last one is the part I would ban outright. A club charging a percentage to resell a seat it deliberately underpriced is collecting the surplus it claimed it did not want, while keeping the moral position.

Pick one. Price it honestly, or ration it honestly. The current arrangement does neither and calls itself supporter-friendly.