With Arsenal season tickets costing up to £2,013, will fans look for cheaper ways of enjoying the game? Potters Bar, who play 11 miles north of the Emirates, are giving free season tickets to anyone interested in attending their ground. Will their plan work? • Supporters group demands action on Premier League prices

Arsenal fans have a lot to be excited about this season. Alexis Sánchez has followed Mesut Özil in swapping La Liga for north London; Aaron Ramsey is raring to go after a restful summer; three of their players have just won the World Cup; and they swatted Manchester City aside in the Community Shield on Sunday to win their second trophy at Wembley in as many matches. There is only one problem for so many of the Arsenal fans who would like to be a part of their club’s season: watching them play costs too much.



The cheapest season tickets at the Emirates this season cost more than £1,000, with the most expensive seats coming in at just over £2,000. Arsenal are always mentioned in articles like this, and rightly so, but they are not the only club charging exorbitant prices. Tottenham fans pay up to £1,895 for a season ticket, Chelsea charge £1,250 for their best seats, and West Ham and QPR are both charging fans over £900 for the pleasure of attending 19 league games this season. It’s easy to see why the Football Supporters Federation are leading fans in a march to the Premier League’s headquarters to protest the rising price of football.



Attending football matches is an expensive business, especially in the London area, which makes the free season tickets offered by Potters Bar Town all the more surprising. The club charged £8 per match last year, but they decided to take a risk this summer and offered free seats to anyone who interested in watching them play. There are no World Cup winners or former Barcelona wingers playing in the Southern League Division One Central, English football’s eighth tier, but families will be able to show up, enjoy a few drinks, eat some lunch and watch 90 minutes of football without endangering their bank balances.



“We wanted to get more bums on seats and thought, ‘What do we have to lose?’,” says Potters Bar chairman Mark Martyn. “Last season our attendances averaged out about 80 to 90. We had as many as 300 when Kettering came down, but we had as few as 30 in other games. We’re going to be losing £8 a head this year, but if we can get 200 instead of 70, they will spend that money it at the bar and on food.



“Our barman is very motivated to do well and is coming up with new ideas. We had a beer festival a few weeks ago, with bands playing all day, and that brought in 2,000 people. We gave out 5,000 fliers at the carnival in Potters Bar a few weeks ago. We rent out our pitch throughout the season. Another club groundshares with us. We’re selling advertising boards, which have never really done that well in the past, but with more people in and more contacts, we can sell more space. Psychologically for the players and fans it’s good to see a whole ground filled with adverts. We do a raffle and maybe people will put some more money into the jar. We will get that money back, one way or another.

This is clearly a risk for Potters Bar, but Martyn believes it will pay off and even influence other clubs in the lower leagues: “People have reacted unbelievably. We’ve had well over a hundred applications for season tickets in the first two weeks. We believe we might have triggered something here. We were playing Wingate and Finchley recently and they were all talking about it. It’s on our website and they’re all asking ‘how are you doing it?’ We could fall on our faces but I am so excited about this season.”

“We need to be noticed. If you went down to the High Street in Potters Bar six months ago, people wouldn’t know where the ground is. There are a lot of clubs within a five-mile radius of us and we are all competing. It’s very, very difficult. We are also up against Arsenal and Spurs. Stevenage are not that far away and they are now in the professional leagues. And around our way you have Woodgate and Finchley, Enfield and so many others.”

As the first chairman in England to offer free season tickets, Martyn has an intriguing take on the prices at the Emirates: “I’m a season ticket holder at Arsenal. I don’t get many chances to go these days, but two tickets have been in my family for years, and my father, my son and my two nephews go. If Arsenal feel that they can get away with it, good luck to them. They’ve still got a waiting list. Those tickets are like gold dust. No one wants to get rid of an Arsenal ticket. You go around to the 60,000 fans there and, yeah, they’ll all moan, but are they going to get rid of it next season? No, very few will. It doesn’t do a lot for football and it’s a shame for the kids, but we pay it as we are fans.

“I’m also a smoker. I have been smoking since I was 14 years old, when cigarettes were something like 50p. When they went up to 70p, we all said we would stop if they went up to a pound. Then it went to £2. Then three, then five, and now my packet of cigarettes cost over £9 but I am still smoking. It’s the same thing: the addiction of football. A supporter paying that money is always going to be frightened that they will have paid it for the 10 years when Arsenal had no success, and now that they are looking good for this season, they don’t want to give it up in case they miss something.”

The addiction of football may transfix the fans at the Emirates on Saturday, but what about the supporters who have been priced out and the youngsters who can’t force their way in? “We are going to attract a lot of young kids who can’t go to Arsenal. We are going to attract a lot of fathers and sons. There are a lot of people out there who are not happy. People with families, who want to take their kids and their kids’ friends to matches are not able to go to Premier League football. For an adult to take a couple of kids to a Premier League match would cost over £150, but they could come to Potters Bar for free, get a burger for £2.50, a programme for £1.50 and have a soft drink at the bar. Suddenly you have an afternoon out for £15, which is a big, big, big difference.”

Martyn is hoping Potters Bar will make it to the play-offs this season. They have a young manager, a dedicated set of players and an ambitious committee who are working together to earn promotion. By the end of the season they might have a new generation of fans.

The photograph above was provided by David Bauckham, who will be speaking about football photography at the Manchester Metropolitan University on Thursday 14 August

