THANKS, BUT NO THANKS

It's a step too far...and a dangerous road to go down

We’ve put up season ticket prices every single year since 2018. We’re unique in that respect amongst Premier League clubs (seriously, not a single other team has done that). So it would only be the most optimistic of fans out there who didn’t think yet another rise was in the post.

However, the scale of the rises - 17% behind the goals, and more elsewhere - is way beyond the scope that anyone expected to happen. A working-class club in a working-class area being expected to pay through the nose has gone down about as well as Jamie O’Hara’s appearance as a pundit at Molineux would. There seems to be little justification for this beyond naked avarice and a misguided belief that we’re a fertile ground for (predominantly overseas) daytripping fans, who typically spend far, far more on a one-off visit than your habitual matchgoer.

1. We’ve just finished 14th. Our third bottom half finish out of the last four seasons, and our 10th placed finish in 2021/22 was achieved with the backdrop of largely appalling football under Bruno Lage and a dreadful end of season run.

2. The club recently received news that as a result of Leicester and one of Leeds or Southampton making an immediate return to the Premier League, the £100m or so of parachute payments due to two of those three clubs will be redistributed back to the current Premier League members. So around £5m apiece. Nice work if you can get it, and no way this could have been factored into any budgetary calculations, as how could we possibly know who was or wasn’t coming up.

3. We’ve been in a cycle for a year or so now of openly reducing spend on the squad, with a host of departures last season and limited incomings, indeed absolutely no first team players at all arriving in January of this year. So the money isn’t going on new players, the wage bill has come way down and we’ve been running a surplus on transfer spending for a while now.

4. This is Wolverhampton. It’s my home town and I love it, but it is what it is. Fulham’s riverside ground on the banks of the Thames it isn’t. Nor do we have the global cachet of a Manchester United or a Liverpool. You might succeed in getting a few hundred Korean fans in to see Hwang Hee-Chan, perhaps. Beyond that? It’s not fertile territory.

The end result is tickets behind the goals that are 64% more expensive than they were in 2018, a summer where we brought in the likes of Jonny Castro Otto, Raul Jimenez and Joao Moutinho. This year we’re looking at Che Adams on a free and the manager has openly been briefing that there won’t be major incomings unless we manage to sell one of our best players for a hefty fee.

The novelty of Premier League football has long since worn off - if the club genuinely think that their “10,000+” waiting list of prospective season ticket holders, largely signed up since those early days under Nuno means anything, I have some magic beans they may be interested in - and it’s not been difficult to get a ticket at Molineux for most games for quite some time now. Assuming you want to pay the very high matchday prices, exceeding £50 for the higher profile games.

Reaction to the prices has been more or less universally negative on social media, and plenty are saying that enough is enough. That goes for me personally, too. Now, they shouldn’t really be losing me. I’ve been attending since 1988. I spend an inordinate amount of my free time talking about us. I live half an hour’s walk from Molineux. For all that I might shudder at watching Matt Doherty play Premier League football in 2024, I still *want* to go. But at some point, enough is enough. You’re taking the piss here. It’s not about me (what I choose to do is up to me), but in microcosm…it’s a bad look. If I’m walking away then plenty who don’t quite have the fanatical enthusiasm to talk about 1990s League Cup ties for fun will also go. Leaving aside those who simply now cannot afford it.

Eventually, a mid-sized provincial club that’s making little effort to do anything other than stand still will get relegated from the Premier League. That’s just the law of averages. You can’t forever rely on there being three worse teams than you, nor is that any fun to watch. And then what? You won’t be getting your precious one-time fans rocking up to watch us play Stoke or Preston. But you’ve annoyed your core support to the point that they might not come back. And what are you going to do about the prices then? Hack them in half, tantamount to admitting you’ve been ripping off your customer base for years?

There’s an overriding lack of direction from the top these days under Fosun. Jeff Shi is woefully ill-equipped for communicating with the fans, as his quarterly missives in the Express & Star read like garbled AI and the message where it matters is “don’t like it, tough luck”. We send out an admirable video concerning mental health amongst football fans and young men…then tell those same young men that for all we care, you can bike it and you’re on your own.

It’s tough to walk away. But tougher to take a kick in the balls (again) and tip your hat to the assailant. Fosun repeatedly show that they misread the values that underpin Wolverhampton Wanderers - so for now, enough is enough.