Tom Woodhouse is 24 and loves his football. He reads about it, reels off player stats like a human Opta and rarely misses watching a big game in the pub with his mates. He never, though, goes to a live match. Tickets grew savagely expensive through his childhood, and his Dad took Tom and his brother Sam to rugby league instead. Tom went to the University of Central Lancashire, where Blackburn was the nearest Premier League club, but as a student Tom could not afford around £30 for a ticket. Neither he nor his mates ever developed the habit of going to games live.
"Now I'm working I could afford it," he says. "But if I have £30 to spare, I'd prefer maybe to do some sport myself, or have a night out, rather than spend it on watching 90 minutes of football."
In the recent, long-overdue criticism of the Premier League's wallet-screwing ticket prices, nobody pointed out its most obvious effect: a large proportion of those who cannot afford to go to matches are young. Before the rampant ticket inflation, young people crowded on to the terraces of the big clubs and became fans for life, but since the Premier League was formed in 1992, a large part of a generation has been priced out. Clubs have mostly offered concessions - still not cheap - for under-16s but above that they have charged full price. Few teenagers, students or young people in their first jobs can afford £30 a ticket, or £400 for a season ticket, even with some clubs' credit deals, at 19.9% APR.
According to the Premier League's most recent supporters' survey, last season just 9%, less than one in 10 supporters, was under 24. The average age of a Premier League fan was 43, part of the balding army who fell in love with football in the 1970s, then developed a supporting habit through the 1980s when it still cost £2 or £3 to get in.
The memory that terraces were packed with teenagers and young lads - not always, it has to be said, behaving impeccably - is supported by the limited statistics available from the time. In those earthier days, the Football League did not conduct surveys of those paying at the turnstiles and pouring in, but some clubs pondering commercial strategies did employ Leicester University's Sir Norman Chester Centre to do so. The surveys found that at Coventry City, then in the old First Division, in 1983, 22% of fans were aged 16-20. At Aston Villa as late as 1992, the survey found 25% of the crowd was 16-20, while at Arsenal, then League Champions, 17% of fans were 16-20.
The proportion of young people steadily reduced as prices went up after the Taylor Report recommended all-seater stadia in 1990, and the First Division clubs broke away from the other three divisions to form the Premier League two years later. In 1989-90, the average price to watch Manchester United was £4.71; it was £5.41 to go to Anfield, £6.71 to see George Graham's Arsenal. The lowest prices, to stand, were a good deal cheaper than that. Lord Justice Taylor called on the clubs not to use all-seater refurbishments as a reason to raise ticket prices, but although they were given up to £2m grants of public money to aid their rebuilding, the clubs all ignored his recommendation.
Clubs do not publish average ticket prices now, but, roughly, they have put the cost up by 600% since then, while, according to the Office for National Statistics, prices in general rose around 82% over the same period. At Manchester United, most tickets are between £30 and £37 now, Liverpool charge mostly £32 for category B games, £34 for category A, while Arsenal charge between £32 and £66 for category B games, £46 and £94 for category A. All three clubs make some half-price concession tickets available for young people but only until the age of 16.
The Premier League responds to the criticism that rising costs have priced people out by recalling that attendances were lower in the 1980s, when the game was blighted by hooliganism and the squalid state of some grounds. Total attendances are up 65% since 1992, with Manchester United's sell-out 76,000 crowds setting records. "The under-24s figure may be 9%," a Premier League spokesman said, "but it is 9% of higher crowds than before, so we don't know if there are fewer young people overall. Some clubs have reduced prices for next season and we have always encouraged clubs to have a range of prices."
Yet the Premier League's evidence does seem to back up the blindingly obvious at matches, that going to football is no longer a coming-of-age ritual for younger people. The Norman Chester Centre's surveys for the Premier League between 1994 and 2001 found the crowd was steadily ageing. Older fans were returning to the revitalised game while the loyal stayed with it, and paid the increases. A younger generation grew up watching the game in pubs.
John Williams, of Leicester University's renamed Centre for the Sociology of Sport, recalls the Premier League being attracted by US sport, and deliberately aiming for a well-off audience. "Crowd loyalty and numbers are greater now because of the Premier League's attractiveness," he says. "But clearly there are dramatically fewer young people. In the 1980s there was a problem with hooliganism partly because young people were there, they could afford to go. For all its problems, there was something socially healthy about football being an inclusive place where people from all backgrounds came together. Something really quite important has been lost."
The sports minister, Richard Caborn, agrees, saying that clubs' community work with disadvantaged young people is undermined by the fact that those same young people cannot afford to watch the clubs' matches. "If they are serious about social inclusion, the clubs have to make that link," he said.
The German Football Association (DFB) decided to allow standing - still a contentious issue here - partly to enable cheaper prices to be available for younger people. Top level Bundesliga games can be watched for as little as £6. "Football, being a people's sport, should not banish the socially disadvantaged from its stadia," the DFB said in a policy statement. "Football is culture. It involves the solidarity inspired by a sense of community. For young people, fan culture is an important factor in the development of their personality."
Steven Powell, of the Football Supporters Federation, which is running a petition for £15 as a fair price to watch football here, believes our clubs are storing up a problem for crowds' loyalty in the future: "Football will bitterly regret losing an entire generation. The clubs should have learned from North American sport about how to run a competitively balanced league, but they learned the wrong lesson. They put prices up, and ignored social inclusion. Our football administrators are obsessed with money above all else."
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