SEASON TICKET CANCELLATION

For the sake of record keeping, my email that I have reluctantly had to send to the club.

Dear Sirs,

Please accept this email as an instruction to cancel my season ticket renewal for 2024/25 and to stop any further Direct Debit payments from my bank account.

Below are three articles I have written in the last fortnight regarding the season ticket price rises and the communications from the club.

https://oscillatingwildly.substack.com/p/thanks-but-no-thanks

https://oscillatingwildly.substack.com/p/jeff-the-tone-deaf

https://oscillatingwildly.substack.com/p/oscillating-wildly-roundtable-1-season

While I don't expect that you will actually read them, if you do, then you'll see the depth of feeling that not only I but other fans hold on the matter.

Following the “announcement” (such as it was – I don't think that it's an accident that our prices appear nowhere on our website, for those outside the club to see), I decided to wait until formally cancelling, in the vain hope that perhaps you would see fit to reconsider your actions, given the widespread reaction amongst the fan base. Instead we got a rather insulting “Q&A” on the website which served merely to restate the foolhardy position, with a further attempt at gaslighting the fans with delusion and blatant untruths.

One thing that fans dislike is being lied to. To pick up on the points made in the piece on Friday:

1. You state that your own studies suggest that our adult ticket prices are “cheaper than most” in the Premier League. Would you care to publish this research, showing that we are the 11^th cheapest (or lower) in the league for 2023/24? Using season ticket prices that are widely available, ie behind the goals, not the handful of tickets that are available at a lower cost in an uncovered stand. I suspect that you won't because it simply isn't true. It takes less than five minutes to look at other clubs' websites and expose that statement as false.

2. As a result of your research, you state that this year's rises are to bring us in line with other clubs, in effect correcting years of low prices. But this simply cannot be true, as we have raised prices every single year since 2018 – indeed, literally the only Premier League club to do so. A ticket in the North Bank for 2023/24 was already in the region of 40% more expensive than the same seat in 2018/19. This year's hike brings the increase to a mighty 64% in six years. In the spirit of benchmarking that you are apparently so fond of, could you please name say, three other Premier League clubs that have raised prices by such a factor over the same period?

3. You make a play on our achievements since 2018 – claiming that we either qualified for Europe or “came near” in four of the last six seasons. While this certainly holds for 2018/19 and 2019/20...there is no way you can claim this is true for 2021/22 or 2023/24 (I can only assume this are the two other seasons to which you refer). In 2021/22 we ended the season with 3 wins in our last 14 games, and this year we finished 17 points behind Chelsea who took the final European spot through league position (indeed, we finished closer to 17^th placed Nottingham Forest, both in terms of position and points earned). It is simply untrue to state that these were “near misses”, in fact the football under Bruno Lage was so dismal that it was incomprehensible that he retained his job for the following season – a mistake which very nearly cost us our Premier League status.

4. You state that these rises are “a crucial step in continuing to compete with our peers in the league”. However, a quick calculation suggests that if every season ticket holder renewed and paid the higher prices, this would realise at most additional ticket income of around £3m per year. Given that our annual revenue is somewhere in the region of £160m, this is less a crucial step, and more of a rounding error. All these hikes serve to do is to hit loyal fans in the pocket; there is simply no way that the additional money – which you won't get anyway, as thousands of fans are refusing to renew – would make any difference whatsoever to player recruitment or abiding to PSR regulations.

I have seen and heard from countless fans who have been attending Molineux for decades who now feel unable to continue with their support. For my part, I have been attending for 36 years. I have renewed under managers I actively disliked, I have renewed when we've been going nowhere in mid-table in the second tier, I have renewed after relegations, I have renewed at points where I couldn't realistically afford to do so. I cannot, on principle, renew this time when the attitude from the club is one of arrogance, delusion, greed and misdirection. To be losing someone who spends so much of his own time talking about Wolves, who has been attending for so long, who lives a mere half an hour walk from the stadium speaks volumes.

There appears to be no will to engage with fans who are unhappy with your actions. Perhaps you think that this will merely blow over and enough fans will begrudgingly renew. I do not believe that this is the case. The anger is palpable, even amongst supporters who are largely inclined to defend the club and against all logic, acquiesce to what you want. I urge you to take up the invitation to have a proper dialogue with at very least, the various fan groups behind the petition to reconsider your stance.

I look forward to your confirmation that my renewal has been cancelled and no further payments will be sent to the club. I fully intend to return to regular attendance when you return to the values that I'm sure Billy Wright and Sir Jack Hayward held – that you cannot take your own fans for granted and a basic level of respect should hold between club and fanbase.

Regards,

Dan Lavelle