Wolves fans warned of potential season ticket price rises

Although season tickets were not on sale for the 2020/21 season due to Covid, there was a 14 per cent rise in 2019 as Wolves established themselves back in the top flight.

That made the most expensive ticket £628, in the Billy Wright upper.

Now, general manager of commercial operations Vinny Clark has hinted that prices could rise again to catch up to their Premier League rivals.

He said: "I came into the business two years ago and one of the key things in the analysis of where we were as a commercial operation was that we’re probably on the cheap side and we do need to realign if we want to compete at the levels we want to compete at and the fans expect of us.

"We’re commercially miles away from – I don’t want to use the big six because it’s not in vogue at the moment – but we’re miles away from them.

"And whilst we never want to be pricing our ticketing so that it’s unaffordable and it’s pricing people out, pricing the working man out – I’m a working-class lad myself. We’re desperate not to do that, and we’re committed not to doing that – but what we do want to do is bring balance and fairness into where we are and to get it to parity in terms of our peers.

"We’re not looking to overprice fixtures. We’re not looking to make season tickets unaffordable. But we do need to reset and realign where we are. Because, historically, in my opinion, and when we look at benchmarking against the Leicester City's and the Newcastle's of this world who we see as our competitors commercially, we’re behind them."

Meanwhile, fans were outraged at the adult prices for the clash with Manchester United last week, which were between £40 and £45.

It was the first time any supporters returned to Molineux for more than a year but despite the outcry at the prices, Clark believes they were not unfair and that the club were selling them too cheaply in the past.

He added: "I get that pricing increases are never celebrated and are never greeted with great warmth, but the reality is as a club we’ve got certain ambitions and we have to operate commercially in a way that is befitting of a club that’s the size and the success that we want to reach.

"My job is I’ve got to try and find the right value balance between the fans and the economic success of the club, and I think if I’m being completely honest – and this is probably an unpopular view – in recent years we’ve probably been undervaluing our products and services. I think tickets have been on the cheap side.

"We underwent a benchmarking exercise recently, which showed that we were sort of 17th/18th in the Premier League in terms of what we charge people to come to the games. And actually, we’ve had three really successful years back in the Premiership and we’ve had a good Europa League run, we’ve reached the knockout phases of that, so we wanted to really realign our prices.

"And I know that’s difficult for people to maybe accept initially, but what we really want to do is be fair. And we don’t think that the pricing structure that is in place for the Man United game is unfair.

"We benchmarked that and there’s actually eight clubs that are charging more than that for their top-price tickets. So we are somewhere in the middle of that group in terms of the Premier League and what they are charging and realistically is where, at this point in time, we need to be.

"The cold reality is you’ll have seen our recent results for 19/20, we posted a £40 million loss, and this year is probably not going to be much prettier than that, so we’re always trying to find that balance of being fair, making sure the fans are getting good value for what they give us, and for being part of that community, but, equally, we’ve got to look after the football club and we’ve got to try to get parity with the likes of clubs we’re trying to compete with."

Executive chairman Jeff Shi added that the club wants to chase the top six clubs and the ticketing revenue is a big part of that.

He said: I would that there is a big misconception from the fans. They think that the major revenue source comes from the broadcasting or whatever and so the ticketing revenue is not important. But that’s wrong.

"When we say the top six or big clubs we want to chase, we want to catch up, the biggest gap is not a broadcasting revenue, it’s the ticketing revenue."