If the powers that be at Aston Villa were remotely concerned their decision to charge extortionately high prices for tickets to Champions League home games this season might lead to repercussions in the form of any sort of meaningful fan protest, they were sent a very clear message on Saturday night. The pointed refusal by the Villa Park crowd to get behind a very minor, but arguably important, act of dissent planned by one supporters’ group let them know in no uncertain terms that the denizens of Villa Park have reached peak meek subservience.
Their unwillingness even to rock the boat gently in the face of grotesque exploitation at the hands of their club let the hierarchy know they could almost certainly have gone full Oasis, sanctioned dynamic pricing and got away with charging them an awful lot more for tickets. It should be added that the relationship between Villa and their fanbase is far from unique in this regard, but as the club prepare to pull up a chair to Europe’s top table for the first time in 41 years when they take on Young Boys in Berne on Tuesday night, it happens to be the one making headlines.
As reported on Saturday by the Guardian, a crowdfunder set up by the fans’ group Villa Academy in the buildup to their Premier League match against Everton paid for 16,000 red cards which matchgoers were encouraged to wave in the direction of the directors’ box for the first 97 seconds after kick-off. The timeframe was significant – a second for each pound the most expensive tickets will cost for Villa’s home group matches against Bayern Munich, Bologna, Juventus and Celtic. As the home side got the ball rolling at 5.30pm there was little or no sign of fan insurrection and the only cards brandished during Villa’s impressive come‑from‑behind win against Sean Dyche’s hapless side were produced from the pocket of Craig Pawson, the referee.
Villa’s blase revelation of how much it would cost to attend Champions League group matches at Villa Park has been viewed by more than 6.4 million people on X and reaction was almost universally negative. The usual incredulous epithets – “disgrace”, “outrageous”, “the game’s gone” – were bandied about, with the prices being compared unfavourably with those charged by Liverpool, Manchester City and Arsenal for the same competition.
Even Newcastle, unused to PR wins since being taken over by the Saudi Public Investment Fund in 2021, emerged with credit when it was revealed the highest price for any of their three Champions League home games last season was a full £15 less than the cheapest ticket available for any of Villa’s four. Many longstanding Villa season‑ticket holders are said to have been priced out of seeing their team play at the very highest level, and those who can afford to pay are dutifully coughing up because … well, of course they are and why wouldn’t they?
The Football Supporters’ Association accused Villa of “exploiting the loyalty of fans” and the Aston Villa Supporters’ Trust described the club hierarchy as “out of touch”. With monotonous predictability, club officials proved exactly how in touch they are by following the lead of other top-flight clubs and blaming the decision to rinse supporters on the Premier League’s pesky profitability and sustainability rules. Increasingly a convenient but completely disingenuous excuse behind which greedy club officials have found a relatively safe place to hide, they are increasingly cited as a “nothing to do with us, guv” justification to jack up the prices of everything from season tickets to match-day parking spaces and half-time pies. Astonishingly, large swathes of assorted fanbases seem to lap up this drivel.
Let’s do some rough sums. A reduction in price of £20 for each ticket for the Villa matches in question would cost the club just over 20% of the £15.6m they receive from Uefa for qualifying for the Champions League. Factoring in prize money, just two group‑stage wins would more than cover such a reduction, a salient point that might well have been raised with Chris Heck at the meeting he was invited to attend with the fan advisory board in May regarding ticket prices, if only Villa’s president of business operations had deigned to turn up. Villa argued that the chief operating officer, Ben Hatton, who was among three club representatives to attend, was the most suitable person to have been there.
When Villa Academy announced on social media last week that its whip-round had been a success, the red cards had been ordered and its protest at the beginning of the Everton match was ready to go ahead, the post was not so much greeted with apathy as outright hostility by fellow fans. It seemed that in an apparent volte‑face from the previous week, they had decided any visible act of dissent in the stands might undermine the efforts of Unai Emery and his team.
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Given the feelgood factor in which Villa Park has been enveloped since the Spaniard took charge of a team 17th in the Premier League and steered them into Europe’s elite, it is no great surprise that supporters are reluctant to dampen the mood, even if their team’s rude health is being routinely exploited by executives at a club that steadfastly refuses to care about its fans anywhere near as much as they care about it.
With a few notable exceptions – the mooted Super League breakaway, a planned Liverpool ticket price hike and the lockdown furlough scheme – the protests of Premier League fanbases against club owners have traditionally been lame, unsuccessful and largely restricted to blink-and-miss-it token acts of defiances. Unaware of the power they wield, supporters remain reluctant to take any kind of stand that might give the subjects of their ire food for thought in case it adversely affects their match-day fun or the efforts of their team. However, if we have reached a point where even an act of fan insubordination so minor as to be negligible is discouraged because Bayern Munich are coming back to town, then the money-grubbing gougers really have prevailed.
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