Gritt23
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- #21
Bozza said:Anyone who has studied even a little bit of economics will know about supply and demand and the elasticity of demand to price changes.
The demand of away fans must be relatively inelastic in that regardless of the price, within reason, they will still make the purchase (of an away ticket).
The trouble is that economics makes a lot of assumption that do not necessarily hold true in the real World.
Yes, in basic economics we have simple straight lines to represent supply and demand, and as you say the elasticity of demand represents how greatly these are affected by prices changes.
But humans are more complicated than that. The basic economic model doesn't explain how pricing something ending in £9.99 works so well. Likewise, we have psycological barriers in our admission prices, and whether it be £25 or £30, more and more of us are hitting our barriers.
Also, I must say that I do not think football clubs understand the economics properly.
1. Too many clubs, particularly in the Premiership have empty seats, that could surely be filled if they lowered their price. If they feel they would have to lower the price too far to entice more in then fair enough, but is that REALLY what they have studied? I doubt it.
2. Taking advantage of the inelasticity of demand is fine, but I would expect that the customers with the greatest level of inelasticity would be the 20-25 year old who have high levels of disposable income, time on their hands, and no domestic responsibility. Well, this age group only develop their love for the club that creates this inelasticity by attending regularly in their early teens (certainly the case for me), but by pricing the early teens out of supporting clubs, means that we don't have them when they reach the age group of 20-25.
It's a very dangerous game, pricing future generations out of the game.