Daniel Levy defends his decision to remove senior concessions at Tottenham
Daniel Levy defends Tottenham’s decision to do away with concessions for senior season ticket holders but his reasoning might not sit well with a lot of Spurs fans.
Tottenham’s controversial decision
Spurs decided to increase season ticket prices by an average of 6 per cent this season, with the decision not going down well with large swaths of the fan base.
Along with the price increase, the club have also removed the concessions for new senior season ticket holders aged 65 and above.
When this announcement was made back in March of this year, The Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust said that they were ‘dismayed’ by the club’s move, with many questioning why they felt the need to do that at a time when their revenue is soaring.
Levy defends decision
Speaking at the Tottenham Hotspur fan forum on Monday, Levy insisted that the club’s financing model would become unsustainable if they continued giving concessions to seniors.
When asked why the concessions were removed, the Spurs chairman said (via The Standard): “We announced a few months ago that we would do a review on the whole concession policy at the club.
“We haven’t stopped senior season tickets because this year we’ve actually increased the number of seniors. We met the FAB last week and we’re going to form a working group.
“There’s an underlying problem that as time goes on if we don’t curtail the number of concession seats in our stadium, our whole financing model will come into question. Because obviously, we can’t have a situation where our ticket revenue ends up falling.
“So it’s a very complicated subject which we are going to review. But match-day concessions are still available, we’re certainly not going to stop them. And we haven’t said that we’re stopping seniors. We’ve just said we’ll put a pause on it at the moment.”
Levy was then asked by fan forum host Nihal Arthanayake if it was true that Spurs do not care about older fans, and he responded: “Absolutely not. We have a duty to look at all fans.
“And we have to make sure we have enough space in the stadium to bring through new fans. So we have to somehow find a balance which is what we’re going to engage with the FAB on and see what we can come up with.”
Levy’s reasoning unlikely to go down well with fans
The critics of the club’s decision will argue that the removal of the concessions and the price increase in tickets will hardly make a dent in the club’s overall revenue, with matchday revenue only constituting a small portion.
They will perhaps view this as further evidence that the current Spurs regime will always put profit ahead of fan welfare or glory.
However, Levy and the Tottenham hierarchy will perhaps point out that the club have posted significant operating losses over the last three years and cannot afford to further reduce ticketing revenue when the demand is so high.
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