West Ham to cut season-ticket prices

Cheapest 2016-17 season ticket will cost £289 if club is in Premier League

West Ham United have announced that they will be cutting season-ticket prices for their first campaign at the Olympic Stadium. If West Ham are in the Premier League in 2016-17, their cheapest adult season ticket will cost £289, down from between £620 and £940 for 2014-15.

West Ham are the first Premier League club to announce a cut in ticket prices following the increased Premier League television deal, which will come into effect in the year of their stadium move. Sky and BT Sport have paid £5.14bn for live Premier League television rights for three seasons from 2016-17.

“We have always said that the move to our magnificent new stadium would be a game-changer for West Ham,” said the West Ham’s vice-chair, Karren Brady.

“It was a chance to increase revenue, invest in the team and improve our performance on the pitch but without putting an extra financial burden on the supporters who already come to watch every home match. This announcement proves we have kept our promise.”

The cost of season tickets will rise for next season – West Ham’s last at Upton Park – by a maximum of 5%. They will then drop again in 2016-17 as the television deal begins.

If the club are still in the Premier League in 2016-17, they say their cheapest adult season tickets will cost £289, which represents a price of £15.20 for each of their 19 home league games. All season tickets for under-16s will be cut to £99. The club will be paying £2m a year in rent to play at the Olympic Stadium but it has 19,000 more seats than Upton Park’s 35,016.

Malcolm Clarke, the chairman of the Football Supporters’ Federation, gave the move a guarded reception. “Any reduction is welcome, so two cheers for West Ham for that,” Clarke told the BBC. “But before we give them three cheers, we await to see what they do about price categories, what they do about away fans and what they do with ordinary admission.”

The news follows revelations the club could face paying millions in compensation, as the stadium move may be in contravention of European state aid laws. London Assembly members, European state aid experts and lawyers have questioned why the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and the London Legacy Development Corporation did not obtain “prior approval” from the European Commission before signing the deal with West Ham, understood to be worth £2.5m a year, plus a slice of catering revenues.

Theoretically, if found in breach, the total bill could equate to the £138.9m it has costing the public purse to convert the stadium for football use, plus the difference between the £2.5m and whatever the EC decided the market rate was.


Guardian