The mancityfans.net football forum

Do any of the members on here know of any good websites to research the real cost of the working mans game.I am trying to find out when football sold out to commercialism as there is no way our great game is any longer the working mans retreat.

You could try searching using google scholar and if the research exists it'll be there :-). The google scholar tab is near images etc top left of search page

The BBC's Price of Football report gives a decent summary, but has only been running for 3 or 4 years.

Most newspaper reports on ticket prices are unreliable, because they tend not to compare like-with-like. However, the Guardian has, in the past, published full ranges, but only for the Prem.

A standard Gold ST with us (not even the Value Gold) works out at about the same price as going to the pub and drinking 3 pints once a week...

Don't know how much Deloittes make their research publicly available but they might be worth a try.

I can't remember which universities specifically, but Liverpool University has a football economics department, I think Loughborough have something too.

My opinion is that you are likely to find that the process began with the realization firstly by the IOC, then FIFA, then UEFA, could massively monetarise their events. Since then, capitalism has been rampant and scandal has followed scandal as football administrators have chased the dollar.

I expect the answer to what happened to club football, is that the same principles trickled down to clubs over time, and there wasn't one seminal moment, but a period of time where clubs and club chairmen adapted to the new form of the game, which had more to do with money than football.

Im_Spartacus wrote:I can't remember which universities specifically, but Liverpool University has a football economics department, I think Loughborough have something too.

Durham have (or had) at least one Sports Economist with a background in German Football, I think, and Hull, UCLan and Northumbria are pretty involved in football research. There's also UCFB at Bucks New University, which I've just found by Googling, but this doesn't seem to have any research output.

I'm sure there was a discussion on here when this came out: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Economics-Footb ... 0521517141. Have a browse through the similar titles, and look up the CVs of the other authors, to see if there are any books or papers that might be relevant. Also, look up their profiles on their department websites and academia.edu, to see if they have anything that's readable/downloadable for free...

Im_Spartacus wrote:My opinion is that you are likely to find that the process began with the realization firstly by the IOC, then FIFA, then UEFA, could massively monetarise their events. Since then, capitalism has been rampant and scandal has followed scandal as football administrators have chased the dollar.

I expect the answer to what happened to club football, is that the same principles trickled down to clubs over time, and there wasn't one seminal moment, but a period of time where clubs and club chairmen adapted to the new form of the game, which had more to do with money than football.

I think this only explains the top end, though. Stalybridge Celtic STs are 220 quid, and it's between 6 and 10 quid to go and watch a League of Wales game. A large portion of these prices will be due to increased running costs - everything from maintenance to lawyers'/agents' fees, which will have gone up due to the introduction of minimum wages and stricter regulations on public events over the past 2 decades; things that haven't only impacted on football...

research for the working man's game you say?

x n x x dot com probably has some source material i'd guess. Added bonus -- it's virtual birth control!

cheers

Thanks for the replies looks like i'm going to be busy.

BlueinBosnia wrote:

Im_Spartacus wrote:My opinion is that you are likely to find that the process began with the realization firstly by the IOC, then FIFA, then UEFA, could massively monetarise their events. Since then, capitalism has been rampant and scandal has followed scandal as football administrators have chased the dollar.

I expect the answer to what happened to club football, is that the same principles trickled down to clubs over time, and there wasn't one seminal moment, but a period of time where clubs and club chairmen adapted to the new form of the game, which had more to do with money than football.

I think this only explains the top end, though. Stalybridge Celtic STs are 220 quid, and it's between 6 and 10 quid to go and watch a League of Wales game. A large portion of these prices will be due to increased running costs - everything from maintenance to lawyers'/agents' fees, which will have gone up due to the introduction of minimum wages and stricter regulations on public events over the past 2 decades; things that haven't only impacted on football...

Increasing cost bases are nothing new in football though are they?

What is new is the realization that many different industries realise that clubs have largely financially incompetent owners. As a result, every con man with products to shift from every industry have become 'football specialist' such as lawyers, media sales, bankers etc and the fuckwits who own the clubs fall for it hook line and sinker.

The industry that has grown up around football since the game began to be monetarised started at the top and trickled its way down through the top leagues until like you say, even the smaller clubs end up with unsustainable cost bases. One of the key issues in that for me was the ITV digital fiasco, which should have been a warning to smaller clubs, but just seems to have spurred on even more financial mismanagement and encouraged more chancers to join the party.