Liverpool’s ticket dispute underlines West Ham’s golden chance for progress

In theory, it is a simple equation. To make more money out of ticket sales, you just need more seats to sell tickets for. But to install more seats you first need to pay for the construction of said seats – and then when you try to pay for that investment, that is when you can run into trouble.

That seems to be the experience at Liverpool, at least, where the club’s owners have extended one of the stands at Anfield (after many years assessing their various expansion options) but, in raising ticket prices to cover the loan on that outlay, have irked their fans sufficiently to spark a protest.

That protest began on Saturday, when around 10,000 fans (according to the biggest estimates) registered their disgust at the proposed introduction of £77 tickets for some games next season by walking out on the home match against Sunderland in the 77th minute.

It did not help that Liverpool, 2-0 up at the time, went on to draw 2-2 against the relegation battlers.

"It is not what we want," manager Jurgen Klopp, who actually missed the game with appendicitis, said of the issue on Monday. "I heard about (the walkout).

"Now I know it's my problem too, but I have to collect more information. We need to find a solution. We don't want that people leave the stadium before the game is finished."

For Klopp, a man who has tried to improve the connection between the club and the fans since arriving on Merseyside as a key part of his plan to revitalise the club, such a breakdown in relations will doubtless be a significant blow.

"For us, it is unequivocal: this is the start," Jay McKenna, spokesman for the Spirt of Shankly fan group, said. "A walkout of Anfield it is unprecedented.

"We don't have a firm idea of what we will do yet as this has all happened very quickly ... but we will be taking action because we need to."

But Wednesday’s visit to West Ham in the FA Cup fourth round replay might be similarly frustrating for Liverpool’s owners, who will see their team come up against a club that already charges more than £77 for some tickets, and has a brand new stadium to move into from next season.

As other big clubs mortgage their assets – or jeopardise their relationship with fans - in order to achieve stadium expansion, West Ham will walk into a bigger ground for a nominal rental fee and similar long-term security.

And with it, perhaps, bigger ambitions about what they can achieve in the future.

For Liverpool fans, the situation is straightforward. The club, like all their Premier League rivals, will earn more than £100m from television revenue alone next season – a huge increase on even the sizeable sums they already receive from Sky and BT. With that windfall coming down the pipeline, supporters do not see how an increase in ticket prices can be justified.

If anything, the thinking goes, prices should be reduced. Matchday revenues are now such a small portion of Liverpool’s overall revenue (19%, according to Deloitte’s latest figures, which will shrink further under the new TV deal) that they make little difference to the profitability of the overall business.

With the increased capacity at Anfield, Liverpool could reduce ticket prices and still bring in the same overall revenues. As it is, the planned price rises are projected to raise just an additional £2m over what the new stand would generate under current price structures.

"Liverpool fans have every right to protest today, they've always stood up for what they believe in," former manager Roy Evans said on Twitter. "LFC wouldn't be what it is without them."

For Liverpool’s owners, the sentiment is different. Expanding Anfield has proven an expensive business – it apparently cost around £115m, or nearly two years of ticket revenues, to expand the main stand – and needs to be paid for as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Rising ticket prices achieves that, allowing the club to then spend more money on players, which should help the club finish higher in the table and then earn more in sponsorship, commercial deals and prize money.

It all feeds into each other – achieving the owners’ twin objectives of a winning product on the pitch and a profitable one off it.

They point out that the £77 tickets are only proposed for six Category A games next season, and only for a block of 200 tickets - while 45% of tickets are actually being reduced in price and 64% of season tickets are being reduced or frozen in cost.

But fans, already feeling that prices are too high, fear that any rise now will only be a precursor to further rises in prices down the line – so feel they must make a proactive stand to prevent any trend arising.

“People should be careful what they wish for," club chief executive Ian Ayre said. "We have great owners - that £100m [to build the stand] came interest-free and they don't take a penny out of this football club.

As Liverpool drag themselves into a civil war that can only distract from matters on the pitch, West Ham can sit back and laugh. Their move to the Olympic Stadium – under ridiculously favourable terms – is already secure, with the increased capacity (from 35,016 to 54,000) meaning the club can already crow about becoming “the first Barclays Premier League Club to use the increased broadcast revenue for the 2016/17 season to cut ticket prices for supporters” on their official website.

The cuts are actually quite significant in some areas (the cheaper season tickets reduced by as much as 25%) but the club will still see a vast increase in matchday revenues for the year thanks to sheer volume of additional tickets they can now sell, along with a vast leap in corporate income.

Liverpool will also perhaps note with interest the Hammers’ current ticket pricing policy – which sees the most expensive adult Category A ticket cost £85 for members, and £95 for non-members.

London weighting plays a significant role in that (for better or worse, England’s economy and therefore its citizens spending power is tipped towards the capital), but such pricing is nevertheless seemingly accepted by a club far less used to top-level success than the Reds.

As Liverpool struggle to finance their own stadium expansion, West Ham will move straight into a stadium as big as the new Anfield, one they did not pay for and yet will recoup vastly increased revenues from.

The strain on a football club of building a new stadium or expanding an existing one cannot be ignored. Arsenal famously were circumspect in the market as they paid off the loans they took out to build the Emirates Stadium, and now Spurs are in a similar situation as they prepare to redevelop White Hart Lane.

Without a billionaire backer to underwrite everything, the cost of such a project forces spending to be limited elsewhere, as Spurs manager Mauricio Pochettino acknowledged at length last week.

"It's true, we have in front a very tough period," Pochettino admitted. "Arsene Wenger says the toughest period for the club was when they built their stadium.

"And now I think that you need to know and the people need to know that this is a very tough period for us.

"We need to be careful, because we need to arrive to the new stadium in very good condition - to try to fight for everything and try to show that we are one of the best clubs and teams in the world."

For Spurs, that means a lot of television money they receive will go into stadium payments, forcing austerity in the transfer market until such a point when everything is paid off – and then they will be a force to be reckoned with.

But for West Ham, handed a new stadium pre-built, all that money can be invested in the playing staff (should the owners choose) – giving them a significant short-term advantage over their near-neighbours.

“I would be disappointed if we don’t join the so-called top six within the next five years,” Hammers co-owner David Sullivan said in 2015. “We know the fanbase is there and it will grow when we move.

Liverpool’s hierarchy have tried to explain their standpoint on the ticket pricing, but it is a PR war they are always going to struggle to win. Their specific situation might actually be understandable – the headline-grabbing price rise really does only affect a small number of games, and seems to only take moderate advantage of the fact demand far outstrips supply at Anfield – but they are waging that battle in a climate where, often justifiably, ticket prices are a hot-button issue.

The Premier League’s refusal to limit the price of tickets for away fans ("twenty’s plenty", as the campaign goes) is a naked example of greed, for example, with clubs unwilling to give up even a fractional part of their income to ensure better atmosphere at all games.

More widely, almost all ticket prices are far higher than their European counterparts (Germany being the most touted comparison), despite the money clubs get elsewhere dwarfing anything those continental sides can dream of.

That has increasingly made many Premier League grounds a place for tourists – especially in London and Manchester – and the transient middle classes, tearing the game away from its traditional routes and towards those who are willing to pay just a bit more to say they were there once or twice a season.

Such a stance is undoubtedly worse for the overall product – atmospheres around the grounds are not what they once were – but it is instructive that boards are willing to put up with that just to add a bit more to their bottom line. If all Premier League clubs agreed to the same caps, then no competitive advantage would be lost by any of them.

Fans undoubtedly should rally against ticket pricing in England, to pressure clubs to take a unified stance to improve matters for the most diehard supporters. Whether Liverpool’s planned price structure is truly an egregious example of greed is almost irrelevant: it has simply come at the wrong time for them, and the right time for fans fed up with being exploited for their passion.

With Premier League television revenue broadly distributed fairly (teams are awarded prize money based on finishing position, but the difference between teams one place apart in the table is not that significant), matchday revenues and commercial income become the battlegrounds on which clubs bring in the money to pay for the best possible side they can afford.

That is why Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City are the dominant forces now - broadly the sides with a combination of the biggest stadiums and biggest sponsorship appeal (and richest owners), ensuring the biggest overall revenues and thus allowing them to spend the most on players.

As has long been established, the correlation between money spent (particularly on wages) and final league position is extremely strong.

Liverpool (and Spurs) are currently in that second tier of sides, a consequence of their greatest successes coming before the Premier League era and their form dropping off just as the league became a truly worldwide phenomenon. Increasing the stadium size is one of the few ways they can try to bridge the gap – but the difficulties that creates, in both financial pressures and fanbase disgruntlement, brings its own obstacles.

Which is why West Ham may be brilliantly placed to bridge that gap that has previously kept them in the third or fourth tier of teams. Some Liverpool fans might see the Reds desire to raise ticket prices as naked greed, while the club itself might present it as the only way to bridge the gap to the top sides in the division, but in reality it may be the only way they can fend off rising teams like the Hammers

As Spurs and Liverpool navigate murky waters, West Ham should, with wise recruitment and sensible management, being establishing themselves as a bona-fide top-six contender sooner rather than later.

“I’d like to see us win the Premier League and then the Champions League,” Sullivan also said. “Yes, I know it’s unlikely but again, not impossible … We have some catching-up to do but we’ve closed the gap.”