Published: 18 February, 2016
by RICHARD OSLEY

THE Twenty’s Plenty campaign, mounted by football fans fighting ticket price rises bursting past the £60-£70 mark, is a little bit ambitious.

It’s already £20 to go and watch Barnet down in League Two, so expecting to get into a top flight game for the same price as it’ll cost you for three pints of beer in Camden Town (in a stencilled Peroni glass, mind you) might be an overreach.

That said, the point of the pressure is completely valid.

It’s the same cost as going to see a big musical show up West, people often say, that’s the cost of entertainment these days. But at least with those equally expensive productions you know what you are getting: there’s singing, there’s dancing, two characters who started the show as enemies turn out to be unlikely lovers by the end. And it’s more or less the same quality every night.

But when you are punting £150 to see a football match with a couple of kids, you don’t know if you are going to get a dull 0-0 draw or a drama-filled, last minute Welllllllbeeeccck moment.

In the past people with limited disposable income – i.e. most of us – didn’t have to worry about whether the one or two matches they could afford to go to would turn out to be the dud games in a season. You paid your money, and whether it was Cantona, Drogba, Henry, or whoever, the deal was seen through with drama, skill and entertainment: We paid the money, and these stars gave us the highest quality in return.

Nowadays, the Premier League is of such threadbare, base quality that literally anybody could be champions. There is no consistent, standout team.

Let that sink in: Here these rain-soaked, exploited fans are, being asked to pay three score and ten to watch football in a division which is so devoid of real quality it could even be won by Leicester or Tottenham Hotspur. The quality has never been so poor, yet the ticket price never so high. 

No wonder supporters are marching through the streets, walking out early, and waving around placards as if they won’t show up when the price goes up, even though, as the laws of cruel addictions have it, we all know they will. Seriously, £70 for a ticket in a league which can be won by good-but-clearly-not-brilliant team like Spurs. Trading standards should be investigating forthwith.

The Champions League has already begun to expose how poor the Premiership is, and in May we will crown one of the weakest ever champions this country has seen. Perhaps, the weakest of all time, and yet these guys want you to pay more for the privilege of watching it.

Suddenly, the demand of the Twenty’s Plenty campaign doesn’t seem so outlandish after all.