The only possible financial reasoning I can think of is that they want to raise the prices of the hospitality, which is where they actually make a lot of money, but feel like they have to have an overall price ladder which keeps hospitality attractive.
Apple does this more than anyone. If you want to buy an iPad the there’s an iPad you can buy at basically £50 increments from £450 to £2500.
It pushes people into buying the absolute best one they can afford, whereas if there were huge gaps, a lot of people who fall in the middle will just go with the cheaper option.
If they make the gap between hospitality seats and the best non-hospitality seats too big, they’ll kill their hospitality sales. And then they have to raise the price of all the seats down the ladder or they’ll create one of those gaps where everyone chooses the cheaper tier.
I’m not agreeing with it! I’m not even saying it necessarily works, I just can’t really think of any other reason.
I used to think they sat down in 2012 or something and thought ticket revenue is X, top clubs get Y, we can’t make that increase in 1/2 years so we’ll bridge it in 20 years. Mooney’s thread has made me doubt that though because even the total increase from 2014 to 2024 is something like an extra £5m/ year revenue? It’s completely insignificant.