We Will Follow The Chelsea Over(drawn) Land And Sea

May 21 • Featured, Tim Rolls • 14582 Views • No Comments

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A revised cfcuk piece by the inimitable Tim Rolls takes an in depth look at just how much someone spends following Chelsea in the modern era.

In idle moments my thoughts sometimes turn to estimating how much it costs to watch Chelsea in a season, even if you try and minimise costs. Now the season is over, I have tried to do just that. The calculation is a chilling one. Excluding the Super Cup Chelsea played 56 games this season. If you did all 56 (I did 52, but plenty will have done the lot) the cost is mountainous (and possibly ruinous). The figures below are a best estimate for this season but I have almost certainly under-estimated the total figure.

Estimated Total Cost of Tickets - £2,400

An estimated figure can be calculated as follows. A home season ticket (19 Premier League games) in the Matthew Harding Upper costs me £880. The 19 away league tickets from the AST scheme cost me £866. Six domestic cup ties another £130. Six home European ties a further £278. Six away European ties (I don’t have exact prices for the European aways as I give my used tickets to a collector friend so have made some educated guesses) c£240. So tickets alone would cost around £2,400 (excluding the European Super Cup, which I treat as a glorified friendly to be honest) and that is in a season, unusual for Chelsea, where we have sadly gone out of both domestic cups before the semi final stage so avoiding exploitative Wembley pricing.

The Chelsea FC decision to subsidise away tickets for Athletico is to be applauded. £20 off a ticket does make a difference, especially given that the short period (11 days) between draw and match, plus the current school holidays, makes cheap travel almost an impossibility. It was still an expensive trip, though. I can’t see that many did travel, a night’s accommodation and match ticket for much under £300, quite possibly more. They also subsidised match tickets for the Sunderland and Cardiff away Premier League games to the tune of £10, again a gesture appreciated by many.

Estimated Total Cost of Travel and Accommodation - £2,100

Chelsea have laid on subsidised £10 coaches (they normally cost £30+) for all Premier League games outside London, plus for the four FA Cup and League Cup ties. They have also laid on £10 trains to (I think) seven games (Man U, Man City x 2, Sunderland in the LC, Newcastle, Hull and Swansea), often those where return travel was difficult or impossible because of nonsensical kick-off times. Chartering and running a train for a Northern trip is an expensive business (I heard a figure of £30,000 a train mentioned) so the club are clearly taking a significant hit on each one they run.

Many supporters have taken advantage of the club travel subsidy to go to away games they simply couldn’t otherwise afford or get home from. I know £200,000 of the Premier League money was supposed to go on subsidising away Premier League games but from my perspective Chelsea are to be applauded – they have offered subsidised travel, done it consistently and also done it for cup ties which are clearly outside the PL remit.

It is hard to calculate what the total Chelsea subsidy has been (I am not sure how many coaches have run to games or how many went on the trains) but I am pretty sure the total will have been well over £200,000, probably over £300,000 when you take the three match subsidies referred to above into account. There is an argument that more money should be spent on subsidising tickets, so those who do not travel from London can also benefit, and it will be interesting to see how the club address this next season.

Home travel for most London based supporters (or those living in Zones 1-6) must be at least £6 a match, a lot higher for many who travel from further afield. Even if you went on club subsidised travel to all out-of-London away games, and cycled or walked to home matches and away games in London, the cost of domestic away travel would still be over £200. In reality, of course, for most it is much, much higher as they cannot use the club travel, or choose not to. The club transport is only of benefit to a small proportion of away travellers, often about 5-10% travel on coaches, a figure that increases to c30% if a club train is run as well.

Anyone taking service trains from Euston or Kings Cross to Northern cities, as I often do, will know that prices in recent years have gone up by far more than inflation and that £45 return is hard to achieve for many places north of Birmingham, even if you book well in advance – fixture date uncertainty doesn’t help here either. A realistic price for travelling to all domestic matches by train , for a London based supporter, is probably therefore at least £162 for 27 home games and £589 for travelling by train to away games (assuming club subsidised trains were used when available). Unless the car is full, driving is often not a particularly cheap option either.

I know a fair number of European away obsessives who sit there with airline websites open waiting for date announcements after the Champions League draw so they can get the best possible priced flights – I am sadly rarely that organised. Travel has to be booked before match tickets are sold or you pay through the roof. Anyone who travelled to all six away Champions League games would be very lucky to spend under £1020 on travel (£170 a game, including domestic travel), plus probably another £300 minimum on accommodation, assuming you only stayed one night.

I met a guy on the club train back from Swansea who has been to every European away game since 1994, and knows of another half dozen who have done the same. I know a supporter half my age who has done almost 50 European away trips, and I’m sure there are plenty of other under 30’s in the same position. The total cost of these trips will run into tens of thousands of pounds.

Estimated Total Cost of Programmes - £160

I stopped buying Chelsea programmes in the dark days of the Tim Lovejoy column, as I feared the drivel produced by the self-basting berk might explode my blood pressure. Many supporters still religiously buy one, however, and at £3 or £3.50 a spin that comes to c£160 for a season of 50 domestic games. There are often no programmes on sale at European away games so I have excluded these.

Estimated Total Cost (excluding Food and Drink) - £4,660

This is probably an under-estimate in terms of what many supporters spend, but on the basis of my figures the total cost of tickets, travel, accommodation and programmes for a supporter who went to every game would be c£4,660.

Estimated Total Cost of Food and Drink - £700 (excluding alcohol)

The cost of food and drink is the great imponderable as it varies so much. We have a number of regular away travellers who rarely drink, others are less abstemious. Many supporters like a few drinks and a meal before a game, and that can easily add £30+ to a day out (a lot more for some….) which could easily mean an extra annual spend of £1500 for domestic games and £360 for overseas games. I have not included this in the total as it is clearly a discretionary expenditure.

Even if you drank no alcohol and just had a pie and a tea in the ground (heaven help you), this would still come to at least £5.50 a game or £275 for 50 home and away domestic games (this estimate excludes the cost of indigestion tablets). Given the cost of service station food and station buffets, this figure is an underestimate and makes no allowance for the fact that for many away games two meals need to be eaten out. Identifying realistic food costs abroad obviously depends on the country travelled to, but six trips with overnight stays would surely mean another £420 minimum just on the basis of 3 cheap meals a day and a few soft drinks.

Total estimated spend if you attended all 2013/14 games - £5,360

This figure also excludes time taken off work and lost earning opportunities for the self-employed etc. In some cases this will be at least a couple of weeks, given number of domestic and European midweek away games played.

It can be seen, therefore, that even if they missed a few games this season hundreds of Chelsea supporters will have almost certainly spent well over £5,000 watching their club – a significant chunk of their disposable income for many, many die-hard supporters. Of course, many other supporters would love to go to most or all Chelsea games but even if they can get tickets simply cannot afford it – they have been priced out of regular attendance.

Aha, I hear you say, “nobody asks them to go to every game” and “many of these people are clearly obsessives”. That may be true (and you certainly get to meet one or two eccentrics in the course of a season) but once it is in the blood, regular attendance at Chelsea games is very difficult to remove, and I suspect many long term regulars will only stop going regularly when age, money, health or family commitments firmly dictate otherwise. I also bet that very few of them have any regrets with regard to how much supporting Chelsea has cost them.

The calculated full cost of watching Chelsea regularly for 30-40 years would be horrendous, and probably best not thought about…