Sense Prevails in Liverpool FC Ticket Price Row | OneFootball

The starting point of any conversation around tickets to football matches is that they are already too expensive. This is true for every top-flight club and I imagine supporters of teams in the Championship would be quick to say it too.

It is where Liverpool Football Club should have begun the conversation around ticket price rises, instead of deciding that they would put them up next season and then do so across the following two seasons to boot.

Unsurprisingly, that announcement got a fair degree of pushback, as I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Now, the owners have decided to back down, at least in part, which is the right decision.

Three Percent Rise Followed By Freeze Announced

When Liverpool played Crystal Palace a couple of weeks ago, the vast majority of supporters inside Anfield lifted up a yellow card to let Fenway Sports Group know that their plans to put ticket prices up were unacceptable.

It was decided by Spirit of Shankly and other groups who were behind the protest that the displaying of the yellow cards should be done in the 13th minute. That is because the club planned to put tickets up by 3% next season and then by ‘a maximum of 5% in the two seasons that followed for a potential 13% increase in prices’. That protest went alongside the removal of banners and flags from the ground.

This morning, the club announced that it had decided to back down on the plan to add an ‘inflationary increase’ for the two seasons that follow the 2026-2027 campaign. That was done after the club had worked alongside the Supporters Board in order to find a way through the mess, with the plan being that ‘longer-term alternative solutions’ will be sought.

Although the ticket prices will still be raised for next season, they will then be frozen for the following campaign in order to allow that period of finding ‘alternative solutions’ to take place. In my opinion, even the price rise for next season isn’t right, but this is better than nothing.

How This Can Be Avoided in the Future

There are some football clubs that are more than happy to simply ignore the will of their supporters. Fenway Sports Group must look on in envy at the owners of Arsenal, for example, who charge some of the highest ticket prices in the country at the Emirates. The problem that John Henry and co have got, though, is that Liverpool fans are unwilling to take anything lying down.

If you want proof of that, you need only look to the remarkable strength and dignity shown by the Hillsborough families in the decades following the disaster, as they sought the truth and a form of justice for what happened, helped in their fight by fellow supporters.

In the aftermath of the club’s disastrous involvement in the European Super League, a decision was put in place to introduce a Supporters Board. The idea was that this Board could tell the football when it was making an error over something, giving them the chance to change course before it got to the point of fans having to protest against it.

This time around, the club chose to ignore the Supporters Board, when this entire thing could have been avoided if they’d just listened to them in the first place. That has to be the club’s way of thinking from now on, or else it won’t be long before we’re once again in a similar situation to this.