The expensive seats are the reason the cheap ones exist

Hospitality is not a luxury bolted onto a stadium; it is the cross-subsidy holding the rest of the pricing together.

Follow the money to the middle tier. Not the executive boxes at the top, which everybody photographs, and not the terraces behind the goal. The band of seats with a decent view, a wider chair, and a food option attached is where a modern ground's economics actually live.

A general admission seat produces a ticket price and, on a good day, a pie. A hospitality seat produces a ticket price three to eight times higher, plus food and drink bought at a margin that would embarrass a restaurant, plus, in the corporate version, a contract signed for a full season regardless of whether the team is any good in February. That last part matters more than the multiple. It is committed revenue in a business whose other income is violently dependent on results.

So when a club rebuilds a stand and the new one holds fewer people than the old one, the outrage about reduced capacity misses what happened. Fewer seats, more revenue per seat, and a cash flow that is less likely to collapse in a relegation year. The finance director is not confused. He has made a deliberate trade of volume for stability.

Where I part company with the current direction is the claim that this subsidises the cheap end. Sometimes it does. A club that funds a stand from hospitality income genuinely can hold down prices behind the goal, and a few do, and they should be praised for it loudly. But there is no mechanism that forces it. Nothing stops a club from taking the premium revenue and raising general admission prices as well, and plenty have, and the justification offered is always investment in the squad.

The tell is what happens at kick-off. Watch the premium band five minutes into the first half. If it is half empty because the lounges are still serving, you are looking at a product that has been sold to people whose interest in the match is secondary, and a club that has quietly reorganised its atmosphere around them.

Empty expensive seats during play are a design failure, not a customer failure. Somebody decided the food service should overlap the game.

You can hear the consequence from the away end. It is quieter than it used to be, and it is not the fans who changed.