Premier League fans are revolting – but for very different reasons

On the Old Trafford forecourt, crowds emerge from the Manchester United megastore weighed down by bags of merchandise, while other fans look for the perfect spot for a photograph.

You can tell the first-time visitors a mile off — all smiles and wide-eyed amazement — but among other United supporters there is a palpable air of resignation as they trudge towards the stadium, looking beyond the glistening facade, seeing how the famous old ground (like the team who call it home) has fallen into decline under two decades of the Glazer family’s ownership.

A group walk by, chanting, “We want Glazers out”. That segues into “Sixty-six quid, you’re taking the p***”, expressing contempt for the club’s decision to increase member ticket prices from £40 to £66, with concession prices removed for the rest of the season.

They are not the only ones with ticket prices on their mind.

Next to the “United Trinity” statue of George Best, Denis Law and Bobby Charlton, a group of Fulham supporters gather, unfurling a banner that says, “We’ve been here through thick and thin. Don’t price us out.”

More fans — some United, some Fulham, representing a wide age range — arrive with a bigger banner, this one promoting the Football Supporters’ Association’s #stopexploitingloyalty campaign. Others, seeing it, stop to applaud the sentiment.

A bigger protest is planned before Arsenal’s visit this weekend, when United fans have been urged to wear funereal black to symbolise how the club is “slowly dying before our eyes” under the ownership of the Glazers and, over the past year, minority investor Sir Jim Ratcliffe.

“The club is facing financial armageddon,” say The 1958, the supporters’ group behind Sunday’s protest, urging United fans to “rise up (…) against the despised Glazers and the club’s deliberate assault on fan culture”.

Welcome to the Premier League’s season of discontent.

It isn’t just United’s supporters (and Fulham’s) in a state of revolt. It isn’t just the rancour that will inevitably greet the imminent outcome of the Premier League’s long-running case against Manchester City. Recent weeks have seen protests at Chelsea, Leicester City and Tottenham Hotspur. A group of Southampton fans are discussing how best to air their frustrations as their club head towards relegation after a dismal season back in the top flight. At other clubs, supporters are mobilising in fear of ticket-price rises.

Below the Premier League in the three divisions of the EFL, supporters of Blackburn Rovers, Cardiff City, Sheffield Wednesday, Reading, Swindon Town and Morecambe, among others, have been on a war footing with their respective owners for years, with trust giving way to fear and loathing. The concerns of Premier League fans can seem trivial by comparison to what’s happening at those lower-division clubs: first-world problems.

Premier League chief executive Richard Masters last week described the league as “fizzing with competition”. At other times, he has described it as “the envy of the world”.

In many ways, it is. Attendances over the past few seasons have been at an all-time high, while television deals continue to grow.

But right now it is also bubbling with discontent. The interests and priorities of football supporters and football club owners have rarely felt more at odds.

There are numerous pressure points and there is a real danger that further ticket-price hikes over the coming weeks — already confirmed at Arsenal and Newcastle United, expected and feared at numerous other clubs, not least Manchester United — will see some of those tensions boil over.

---

In a question-and-answer session at last week’s Financial Times “Business of Football” conference, Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly was asked how he felt about the protests before the club’s recent home victory against Southampton.

“It’s par for the course,” he said. “The reality is, the sooner you realise you’re not going to keep all of the people happy all of the time, that’s when freedom shows up.”

Boehly’s words would arouse nods of agreement at Premier League shareholder meetings. “Par for the course” — as if to suggest you’re damned no matter what you do. Would he ever stop to wonder why there are never protests against Matthew Benham at Brentford or Tony Bloom at Brighton & Hove Albion? Probably not.

It is certainly true that owners of English football clubs have often been cast as bogeymen, from Bob Lord at Burnley in the 1960s to Peter Swales at Manchester City in the 1970s and 1980s. The Glazers have been public enemy No 1 at Manchester United since they bought the club in 2005, but the Edwards family, United’s owners in the 1970s and 1980s before it was floated on the stock market in 1991, were not regarded fondly either.

But these days so many owners are detached or distanced from their clubs and the supporters — either culturally or geographically, or both.

It is not a question of nationality, but remoteness can mean a lack of accountability and, in turn, can heighten suspicions about why an investor from the United States, Middle East, China or anywhere else might want to buy an English football club. With fewer and fewer exceptions, the relationship between supporters and clubs/owners are becoming strained like never before.

The issues at Manchester United, for example, are well documented but bear repeating.

A club that was previously debt-free and profitable (not to mention enormously successful) was bought by the Glazer family in a leveraged buy-out that immediately loaded United with £660million of debt. In just under 20 years, the privilege of being owned by the Glazers has cost United more than £1bn in interest payments alone. After a decade of erratic transfer spending and on-pitch underperformance, the club are now citing their straitened financial position to justify a recent wave of redundancies and ticket-price rises.

Nobody would accuse Boehly and his co-owners at Clearlake Capital of failing to invest since buying Chelsea from Roman Abramovich just under three years ago, but it was interesting to note some of the messages on banners and placards at that recent protest at Stamford Bridge. One of them read, “No FOS (front-of-shirt) sponsorship, no stadium plans, no UCL (Champions League) football, average squad, player-trading-obsessed.”

That all felt very 2025 and indeed very specific to Chelsea, where initial excitement over the club’s transfer spending under new ownership has given way to confusion over the nature of that recruitment, which smacks more of a player investment portfolio than building a top-class football team.

But there were other issues highlighted at that protest, including Boehly’s involvement as a director of and investor in Vivid Seats, a ticket exchange website that allows the resale of Premier League match tickets for thousands of pounds above face value.

Across London at Tottenham, protests have been directed at executive chairman Daniel Levy due to the perception that business has been prioritised over football under his leadership of the club. Spurs consistently record the lowest wage-to-turnover ratio in the Premier League, but their most recent accounts show that Levy was paid more than £6million during a disappointing 2022-23 season where Tottenham finished eighth, maintaining his position as the league’s highest-paid executive.

A statement by Project Reset, which describes itself as a “non-violent protest about the footballing leadership at Leicester City”, highlighted “The Five Dysfunctions of a Failing Football Club”: absence of trust, fear of conflict, a lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results. Criticism of Southampton’s Sport Republic ownership has centred on the same issue: a lack of trust.

---

Back on the forecourt at Old Trafford, before United’s FA Cup fifth-round tie against Fulham last Sunday, The Athletic bumps into Football Supporters’ Association chair Tom Greatrex.

“At a lot of Premier League clubs, the fans are feeling like they’re being exploited,” says Greatrex, who was the Labour Co-op MP for the Scottish constituency of Rutherglen and Hamilton West between 2010 and 2015. “I grew up supporting Fulham. Why did I start going? Because it was easy and cheap for my dad to take me. Why did I first take my kids? Because there were cheap tickets 15 years ago. That’s not the case anymore.”

Indeed. Fulham’s tickets are now among the most expensive in the Premier League. For games against leading clubs such as Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United, the cheapest adult tickets for home fans are £67, while non-hospitality seats in the new Riverside Stand at Craven Cottage cost £160. Tickets in the “Sky Deck”, which offers “game-changing hospitality” and a rooftop terrace with views across London, cost £718.80.

The club feel their pricing policy has been justified by frequent sell-out crowds and by the extra revenue generated. For the biggest games at their 25,000-capacity home, demand far outstrips supply, reflecting not only a wealthy contingent among their fanbase but also a big market for corporate entertainment and one-off ticket purchases — particularly among tourists and overseas fans who are willing to pay a premium to watch Liverpool or Manchester United, for example.

“I don’t think any Fulham fan would object if part of the capacity in the Riverside Stand is targeted towards that and sold internationally as package tours — the same way people (from England) go to games (at clubs in continental Europe) or wherever,” Greatrex says. “But to effectively replace long-standing fans by putting the prices up so much, it has a damaging effect on atmosphere.

“Marco Silva (Fulham’s head coach) spoke recently about the importance of atmosphere and importance of the fans getting behind the team, but that’s getting harder because a lot of the people who traditionally do that can’t afford to go anymore.”

As this report in The Athletic detailed, Premier League ticket prices remain competitive in relation to those in the NFL, where Fulham’s owner Shahid Khan owns the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Glazers own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But the two sports’ business models are markedly different, as are the stadiums and fanbases.

“It has got to the point where people I know, who have been going to Fulham for years, are not taking their kids because they can’t afford to. The worry is that we’re not growing and sustaining the future fanbase,” Greatrex says. “Fulham are not going to be in the Premier League forever. There will be harder times at some point and, if you haven’t got that (fanbase) to fall back, it’s doing a lot of long-term damage.”

Greatrex harks back to the Covid-19 pandemic, when football was forced to play on behind closed doors for more than a year and clubs talked so much about how much they missed supporters and looked forward to welcoming them back. “That all seemed to get forgotten pretty quickly,” he says.

There are exceptions. Greatrex feels Fulham’s neighbours Brentford have shown the way under Benham’s ownership, and is also encouraged by Liverpool and West Ham United freezing ticket prices for next season. “The fans were not asking for anything unreasonable, but they were able to raise their objections with a collective voice — and they have been listened to, which is what we ask,” he says.

There is a temptation to regard Fulham’s ticket-price model as a one-off, specific to their location in an affluent area of west London and the recent stadium expansion which has allowed them — unlike another of their neighbours, Chelsea — to look beyond their core fanbase.

But then you remember something Ratcliffe said recently when he was interviewed by the United We Stand fanzine — “I don’t think it makes sense for a Manchester United ticket to cost less than a ticket to see Fulham” — and it starts to look a lot more opportunistic.

---

On Sir Matt Busby Way, the crowds are trudging towards Old Trafford.

For a long time, from the early 1990s to the 2010s, this pilgrimage was made with a spring in the step. Not now.

“The mood is despondent,” says United fan Anthony Murphy, selling the latest issue of United We Stand. “What’s happening on the pitch is rubbish, but we’ve seen that before and we can handle that. The really damaging thing is the way the club are treating the fans.

“Don’t get me wrong, there’s always been a strange relationship between the club and the fans. There has been moaning for as long as I’ve been going. But it’s extraordinary what’s going on at the moment with Ratcliffe and the £66 tickets. It’s almost like the club is trying to antagonise the fans.”

United dispute that. Ratcliffe has said the club must make “difficult and unpopular decisions” in order to improve their financial position. But that predicament can be blamed almost entirely on the Glazers, both for the burdensome debt and for the way they have run the club, failing to invest sufficiently in the stadium and infrastructure and allowing the team to drift into mediocrity without any clear strategy.

The concern is that, since Ratcliffe bought his minority stake early last year and took control of the football department, the expensive mistakes have continued and results have grown even worse.

It is a testament to United’s enduring appeal that just about every home Premier League game is a sell-out, hence the club’s determination to explore ways to redevelop and expand Old Trafford or to build a new, 100,000-capacity, stadium on an adjacent plot.

But the attendance against Fulham on Sunday was 67,614 — almost 6,000 below capacity. That is an extremely healthy turn-out for a match shown live on free-to-air TV in the UK, but undeniably reflects a drop in demand.

United play at home this Sunday too, against Arsenal in the Premier League, and with 48 hours until kick-off there were third-party ticket-selling agencies offering seats at the game at face value rather than many times above it, as has often been the case in the past. “Social media is full of people trying to get rid of their tickets,” Murphy says. “A friend of mine tried to sell me a ticket (for the FA Cup tie against Fulham) for £10.

“People don’t want to go, but they’re worried about losing their season ticket if they don’t use it. They’ve got this policy where, if you miss a certain number of games, you can get your season ticket taken away. I find it incredible how a company can get away with treating customers like that.”

---

Martin Cloake has written numerous books about his beloved Tottenham Hotspur. Beloved? Well, kind of. But it feels like a one-way relationship these days.

“I’m part of that generation that’s starting to think, ‘Is this the same game that I grew up supporting?’,” Cloake says. “I think it’s a reflection of the modern world really, where people don’t like the way things are going.”

It is hard to avoid the ticket price issue at Spurs, though. “We’ve got to get away from this narrative that, ‘It’s the fans’ fault. You’re exploiting yourself. Why don’t you stop going?’,” Cloake says. “Football isn’t like going to the supermarket. If you don’t like Tesco, you can to go Sainsbury’s. But you’re not going to find Spurs fans going to Arsenal.

“The conversation should be about Premier League clubs making a choice that they don’t have to make. It’s a very different picture in the EFL, where gate receipts are incredibly important, but TV money is so high in the Premier League that gate receipts are a much lower portion of total club income. We want to challenge what we’re hearing from clubs about ticket prices.”

Cloake believes the commercialisation of English football has gone too far. He feels, like many, that a club’s purpose is to represent and bring joy and pride to their community, while acknowledging that these days “community” means a global fanbase rather than just the immediate neighbourhood or surrounding district, town or city.

He also acknowledges — indeed insists — that clubs should be run sensibly as businesses. What he will not accept is the notion that a club should be run for the benefit of their ownership — whether that is a family of real-estate investors from the United States, a Russian oligarch, a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund or, in Tottenham’s case, an investment company owned by the family trust of a British billionaire and registered in the Bahamas.

Cloake, formerly co-chair of the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Trust, applauds some of the ways the club have progressed under ENIC’s ownership, but his longstanding concern, reinforced by a downturn in the team’s performance over recent seasons, is that they are either unwilling or unable to do whatever it takes to create the “cultural change” and “elite sporting mentality” needed.

At the same time, he vehemently opposes the prospect of Spurs being sold to an overseas government, and particularly not one with “dubious policies”. He says he would “walk away” if that happened.

Is it possible to strike the right balance between commercial growth and on-pitch success?

Cloake points to Liverpool’s success under the U.S. ownership of Fenway Sports Group as an illustration that those objectives are not mutually exclusive — and that a fanbase being able to hold the club and their board to account is vital.

“Are Liverpool’s owners committed Scouse socialists? No,” Cloake says. “But do the club listen to the supporters’ arguments about culture and community? Yes, I think they do. And they have also seen that fans are prepared to organise and mobilise, for example with the walkout at Anfield. (That’s a reference to an incident in February 2016, when many fans walked out in the 77th minute of a home game against Sunderland in protest at proposals to raise ticket prices to £77. Those plans were subsequently dropped.)

“I think there is a better listening culture there than at a lot of the other clubs in the Premier League. There are still criticisms of what goes on, but their owners know that if push comes to shove, the fans are prepared to do something.”

---

In an interview with beIN SPORTS this week, former USMNT goalkeeper Tim Howard caused a stir.

Surveying the mess at his former club Manchester United, Howard, now a minority investor in U.S. second-tier club Memphis 901, said criticism of the Glazers was unjust because “when you spend your billions to own a business, you have the right to run it any way you want”.

Howard’s words were particularly misguided with regard to the Glazers, who spent United’s own money — more than a billion pounds of it — to first buy the club and then sustain their failing ownership. But even the general argument, that a club’s owners “have the right to run it any way you want”, is one that many European football fans find offensive.

The growing concern is that the number of owners who have the interests and long-term health of the game at heart — or even at the back of their minds — has dwindled at an alarming rate.

There is so much emphasis on squeezing the product for everything it is worth, even if that means alienating loyal supporters. The owners of the biggest European clubs have spent the past two decades pushing for an even greater portion of the wealth that football generates, creating enormous competitive imbalance and then agitating for a European Super League or other structural changes that will preserve and widen these inequalities in perpetuity.

Historically, protests by English fans have been isolated to specific issues affecting specific clubs, with little of the solidarity and whole-game view seen in, for example, German football.

But the successful uprising against the European Super League launch in 2021 — particularly among fans of the clubs who had signed up to it (Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham) — hinted at increased solidarity. So, too, have this season’s protests against ticket prices, with fans of numerous teams joining forces to voice their concerns.

There are some who feel supporters have become too entitled, that the only time they should be heard is when getting behind their team on the terraces.

Former Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan wrote in the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper this week that he fears “a generation of perennial and slightly deluded protesters is here to stay” and that, if there are question marks against the names of some of the people who buy football clubs, “in the end it could be said you get the owners you deserve”.

Jordan has previously defended the Glazers and told “entitled” United supporters to “get over” their objections to their club’s owners.

“No, they are probably not ideal,” he wrote in a previous Mail column. “But what is ideal? A Russian oligarch sanctioned by the government who proceeded to set football finances on fire? Or would you prefer what (Manchester) City had with the disgraced Thai leader Thaksin Shinawatra, who was neck-deep in corruption? Or a regime that allows journalists to be cut up with bone saws?”

You might think that these cursory references to some of the Premier League’s most notorious owners had come from someone who feels English football deserves to be protected from the free market that has caused such upheaval. But no, Jordan supports the status quo. Like many of his modern-day successors around the Premier League table, he is firmly opposed to the proposed introduction of an independent football regulator.

“One of the things the Premier League and the anti-regulation lobbyists keep saying is that the Premier League is an amazing economic success,” Cloake says. “In many ways it is, but let’s have a look, shall we?

“Liverpool, who are going to be champions (this season), made a loss of £57million last year. Brighton are seen as a massive success story and they’ve done a lot of really good things, but their success has been based on a benefactor owner (Tony Bloom) loaning them £400m. Is that a sustainable business model? I would argue probably not.

“Probably the most sustainable business model is Tottenham. But is it run successfully as a sporting institution? It isn’t.

“So we’ve got this amazing success story, the Premier League, but so many clubs are losing money and now almost every club is saying, ‘We need to look at raising ticket prices.’ Something doesn’t add up.

“And then it becomes, ‘Oh, it’s the fans’ fault’ because the fans want clubs to spend lots of money on players. But that argument is starting to lose its edge because fans understand the differences between wage bills and transfer fees and where different types of spending go.”

---

Certainly there are fans who feel differently, wanting their club to reinvest every last penny they earn as transfer fees and wages for star players. But among many match-going supporters there is a feeling that, with television and commercial revenue soaring, the financial benefits of raising ticket prices are barely a drop in the ocean.

If a mid-sized Premier League club makes an extra £1million a year in matchday revenue — let’s say, more or less, an extra £2 on every seat in a 26,000-capacity stadium for the 19 home matches — that might help them afford the wages of a slightly better class of back-up goalkeeper. They can make more than that in “merit payments” just by finishing one place higher up the table.

The Manchester United Supporters Trust (MUST) pointed out recently that the recent ticket-price rises at Old Trafford were likely to raise less than £2million over the remainder of the season — the club paid £10.4m to extend and then terminate Erik ten Hag’s contract as manager in the space of four months last year, while Dan Ashworth’s five-month spell as their sporting director cost £4.1m. “This shows big increases in prices would be futile and counterproductive,” MUST said.

It calls to mind Oscar Wilde’s famous line about the definition of a cynic as “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.

Less well known is the rebuttal that follows in the next line: that a sentimentalist “is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing”.

If that is the case, many fans would happily regard themselves as football’s social conscience, feeling that it must always be seen primarily as a sport, not as a business. And many football club owners would be more than happy to regard themselves as the cynic, taking care of business in a world full of absurd sentimentalism.

Exploiting loyalty? As Gordon Gekko says in the movie Wall Street, “It’s all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.”

But the conversation is getting louder.

And as this season of discontent heads towards its final weeks, tensions that have simmered for months are threatening to erupt.

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Will Tullos)