Fulham are still 'greedy', even if the noise has died

Swathes of empty seats available for Wolves are a disgrace

Remember when the price of Fulham tickets was all we had to moan about? I sort of long for the days where Shahid Khan was the only one price-hiking. Now, when it costs about £2.50 for a tiny carton of orange juice, Fulham charging 100 notes for a Premier League football match doesn’t seem like such an outlier.

The noise has died on what Fulham charge for tickets at Craven Cottage and to all intense and purposes, the war is won. Sure, the fans landed a few glancing blows that embarrassed the top brass over the years, but they’ve won.

The FST presented a survey to the club earlier this month about how ticket prices had negatively impacted how they value the club, but from the outside it feels like the club don’t really care what the FST show them any more.

Results from the FST’s survey on match ticket prices

And yes, the Fan Advisory Board, or the FAB for short, any signs of life there? Well, their most recent minutes didn’t really reveal all that much other than there are a lot of working groups doing stuff that we can’t really see yet. There are some well intentioned people on the FAB, but meaningful action that us fans will actually feel seems miles away.

If you’ve read my ticket rants before, then you will see little in this article that is new or original. I’ve made my position clear, as have hundreds of other Fulham fans.

This is what the club hope for, that we all shout ourselves into exhaustion. They hope that the pent up rage that we have for how Fulham is run off-the-pitch just flames out because there is no oxygen given by the club themselves. I must admit, I’ve not really complained all that much this season, because after a while it’s all just quite samey.

Then, I just decided to have a look at how ticket sales had gone for Wolves on Saturday. In all honesty, the reason I looked is because I had a spare season ticket going and I wanted to see why the ticket exchange wasn’t open (Fulham only open that once a game has sold out). The answer was pretty clear why…

Ticket sales in the Riverside Stand less than 48 hours before kick-off

In the Riverside Stand there are swathes of un-purchased seats, all of which are a minimum of £100 for adults. In the Putney End there are also a host of available seats, which have a starting price of £61 for adults.

After the Wycombe game, Marco used the old classic “12th player” line - encouraging atmosphere from the Fulham fans to get his team over the line against Vitor Pereira’s struggling side. I’m not having a go at Marco, but if he thinks Saturday’s atmosphere isn’t good enough - he should go to his superiors and ask them why there are empty seats for such a crucial game.

Marco certainly hasn’t hid his discontent about the lack of transfers, it would be a nice change if he also called out the club for pricing out Fulham fans for a match where so much is at stake.

If we were selling out every game, then maybe we’d have less of an argument to make against these sky-high prices, but the fact is that we aren’t. This is one of the biggest games of Marco’s tenure, and the club are letting him down with a below capacity attendance.

And yes, to be clear, this is Shahid Khan’s fault, this is Alistair Mackintosh’s fault and this is Tony Khan’s fault. All three could do something about it if they wanted to. Ali Mac gets the flack, and rightly so for the utter contempt that he shows to supporters, but this recent comment from Shahid Khan shows that he knows exactly what’s up too.

There should be no excuse for not selling out a Premier League football match on a Saturday at 3pm, particularly one as big as this. Fulham v Wolves is not a game that will attract tourists in their droves willing to pay big bucks, it is however a match that loyal Fulham fans want to be at because of its importance to the season. Maybe if Shahid, Tony or Alistair had their head in the real world they’d understand that.

All three hate me using the term greedy, but it applies here. This isn’t about PSR, or how much the Khans have invested into the club. This is a simple case of failing to sell out our stadium for the biggest match of the season all because you decided to price out loyal fans for an inflated tourist market that isn’t even there. That is the textbook definition of ‘greed’.