Vincent Kompany, captain of English Premier League leaders Manchester City, focussed on the positive effect that cutting ticket prices could have on a club’s performance in his dissertation as he completed a master’s degree.
Kompany, who has won 72 caps for Belgium, recently graduated from Manchester University’s Alliance Manchester Business School with a master of business administration degree.
His dissertation looked at how clubs can benefit from home-game advantage and improve performance.
The 31-year-old said clubs needed to ensure that less well off fans who had supported clubs for generations could afford to go to games. He said teams could improve performances and long-term revenue by attracting the most loyal fans.
Speaking to BBC Radio 5, he said: “You get better home advantage depending on the atmosphere that you can create within your facilities, and that is linked to the people who enter your stadiums.
“At what point do you decide we are actually now going to make sure that if it is a TV product, it is the best product in the world? Meaning not just the best players, but the best atmosphere in the stadium; meaning the right people in the right place.’
“There’s a business angle to it — if you tie it to how somebody feels when they go to the stadium — ‘I love this club, I want to support this club’ – you make more noise. That is a proven factor in home advantage. You win more games at home — every point has a value attached. For every pound that you lower the ticket price, if you can recover it in that home advantage, you maybe won’t have a loss.”
Surveys over recent years have shown that Premier League clubs are constraining ticket prices. Research by the BBC found in November that 80 per cent of ticket prices in the Premier League had either been reduced or frozen for the 2017-18 season.
IMAGE: Higor Douglas
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