Money to Burn

Never too far from being in the spotlight is discussions about the cost of football.

The nation's sport was, once upon a time ago, a cheapish day out. A fiver/tenner or so for a ticket on the terraces, a bit more cash to eat and make the trip down and your weekly entertainment was set.

Time has put paid to this, as you would expect. Everything seems more expensive, which is small wonder given there has been roughly 77% total inflation between 1990 and 2011, which will ramp up prices a fair bit. Lots of cash was forked out to upgrade decaying stadiums in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster to make them safe again, or to build new stadiums which has also ramped up the prices.

But no one could quite forsee the exact level this has reached. Many fans feel they can no longer the season ticket price, nevermind the cost of actually following the team around the nation. Small wonder too - while no other tickets reaches the mindblowing extent Arsenal reach, Premier League teams and a number of Championship sides still charge crazy money.

To put it into context, you could watch a category A match on the terraces at Old Trafford in the 1989-90 season would set you back £3.50 and if it was mere the inflation rate posted above, it would now be an equivalent of £6.20. No chance of that, given few teams charge below £40 for a ticket, which is a long and frankly insane way from rationality. To put it into context, German top tier teams normally come to around £15 - in the UK, you have to go to the lower leagues to get such value.

The valuation also seems absurd when it comes to the action - although there is a lot of top quality action, it's a bit of a game of chance to whether or not you make a classic or a clunker. Not to mention that it can be a struggle to also afford Sky, long painted as an essential for football fans despite their prices looking set to rise again.

Value for money is certainly questionable, not least when you throw in the increased travel costs - petrol is forever on the increase, at a rate only train fares seem able to beat.

Long before Sunday's big game between Arsenal vs Manchester City hit the headlines for this reason, it seemed something have to give, and sure enough a good chunk of away end tickets are unsold. Of a 3,000 allocation, City returned almost a third of this, with seats instead fully sold to the home support.

The City fans certainly have sane reasoning - £65 for a ticket, getting there, either by fan coach or by the stupidly overpriced Manchester-London line, and of course the addition of food, drink and other potential expenditure, is a thoroughly draining experience on the wallet.

With City classed as category A, this sort of treatment is commonplace. Along with their visit to the Emirates Stadium, City's next few league away trips seem them visit QPR (a monumental £55), Southampton (£38), Aston Villa (£45), Everton (£42) and Manchester United (at least £45, but could well be higher). All this after some of the more devoted spent £90 on tickets alone for trips to Sunderland and Norwich over Christmas, nevermind the expense of doing 700-odd miles of round travelling over the notoriously difficlut holiday season.

Season ticket holders do get a fairly raw deal for their loyalty, and those in the away end of Sunday's game will be surrounded by a pretty prime example. Arsenal fans have the country's (and possibly the world's) most expensive season tickets, with the cheapest costing £985. Even with free European and Cup games, this is a truly outrageous cost, and that's before factoring in the additional expenses for away games.

Arsenal will justify this as part of their efforts to meet Financial Fair Play regulations while they are paying off the stadium they moved into back in 2006. But fans are beginning to feel alienated by the sheer cost of it, not least during the sharpest recession for over 70 years and where Arsenal fans feel alienated by their lack of recent success.

Of course it is not only Arsenal that do this - they are merely the top of the expenses tree and they do make some concessions for less inticing games, which is something you can't say for Chelsea or Spurs. City themselves are also fairly pricy, with Southampton fans having to stump up £52 for their season opener in Manchester.

It's not just these high-profile games where this is a problem, as there is growing feelings the sport as a whole is becoming vastly unaffordable for the common man.

Football as a sport has critics that use the cash in the game as an argument, and times like these are when even the hardcore can sympathise. With players, agents and directors getting the stupid money that even dictators can only dream of, it seems more absurd that the extra cash generated by the expanded Sky/BT television deal seems to be being funneled direct to them.

It is hard to see how economically sustainable modern football is. At some point, if maybe not just yet, there will be a point when a significant majority of fans of all colours will declare enough is enough and refuse to pay the prices expected of them. But even if fans keep paying, most of the Premier League make huge losses to afford the massive wages that their players and directors expect to be paid for their services.

There's only so long you can continue making losses in any business before they inevitably catch up and consume the business. Football certainly has its own examples - Leeds United and Portsmouth spent way above their means to get success and soon enough their finances screwed up, leading to a massive collapse and plummet down into League One.

The case of Portsmouth could still end in further misery, with doubt on the clubs overall future after several administration attempts, nine players already leaving in the transfer window and the team on a losing streak that leaves them in the League One relegation zone.

Many lower league sides are barely scraping by as it is, with one football administrator claiming that the majority of these teams are in some form of financial difficulty or another.

The majority of the Premier League make losses, with some - Man City with an impressive figure of -£195million - massive ones amongst the names. Only a handful of clubs make profits and even then these are fuelled by the odd mega-bucks transfer, or from real trimming of the fat. It is likely that the increase in cash the Premier League's new £3billion TV rights deal will plug this gap rather than alleviating pressure on the fans' wallets, even despite calls for this money to help give fans some relief.

As a result, fans are having to finance rampant overspending at all levels as teams try to find success. People can no longer afford to go with their kids, who have now grown used to seeing all the games for free on a proxy site instead of actually sampling the stadium's atmosphere, and puts future support out of kilter.

Of course it's not just football - other sporting events, major concerts, massive comedy shows, theatre productions, even film tickets are all pretty expensive - but nowhere quite like football is this being felt. Questions will always be raised but unless something can be done about it the sport once described as the working man's ballet will be all out unaffordable to those people, taking the game's atmosphere with it.