Jeff Shi column on season ticket prices

In this extract below, the chairman addresses season ticket prices, with emails being sent out to supporters this morning:

This season, our commercial revenue is the highest in history, thanks to the contributions from our domestic and international fans, business partners and all the people who like and support Wolves. It’s not easy, since the macro environment of economy is still very tough. I am confident next season we will keep the upward trend and push for another record of both revenue and fanbase.

Our financial performance is also strong. If we remove non-recurring profit and loss, we should break even or be very close to a positive bottom line. We still need to be cautious about PSR, but no doubt financially we’ve turned the corner, successfully sailed out of the unprecedented storm that was mainly caused by the irrational arms race happening in front of our eyes in the league since Covid.

When we talk about commercial revenue, ticket prices are always a challenging subject. As a consumer myself, of course I want everything as cheap as possible.

It’s very understandable that some fans feel frustrated if the cost for Premier League games gets higher and higher.

The only way to price it fairly is benchmarking our price with the other 19 clubs, especially with those peers who have similar fanbase size, stadium capacity and sporting achievements. It shouldn’t be much higher than theirs but shouldn’t be much lower either.

Our ticketing team have researched each Premier League club, compared Wolves on almost every aspect with them.

I believe the final pricing is a fair and reasonable reflection of where we are now, where we were and where we are heading. Why is commercial growth so important? Some fans may argue that the TV rights revenue from the league is always the main source of cash.

They are right, however, from the cost side: wage bills can easily offset all the broadcasting contribution. In fact, clubs’ disposable income is mostly from commercial areas, which is also the key difference between the bigger clubs and us.