A couple of months before this summer’s European Championships in Germany, a shame-faced friend confessed to me that she’d spent an entire work day in UEFA’s ticket portal scrambling for tickets to give her husband for his birthday. In the end, she succeeded, landing a pair of tickets for a quarterfinal game in Berlin.

“Well done!” I said. “How much did you pay for them?” That was the real reason for her shame. She wouldn’t tell me, so I started guessing. “Keep going,” she said when I’d reached €500 ($550) per ticket. “I can’t go any higher,” I said. “I’m getting dizzy and sick just thinking about it.” She eventually confessed to having paid €700 for the privilege of attending one game of soccer. And another €700 to show her husband how much she loved him. And those were on-stub UEFA prices, not scalpers’ mark-ups.

Still, it’s an event that they’ll always remember, and they ended up spending a fine weekend while watching the Netherlands beat Turkey 2-1 in a game of much drama but not much quality. If I only had a dollar for everyone I’ve told about this scandalous rip-off, then I could have joined them.

I’m dredging up the story one more time because ticket prices have been in the news thanks to the concept of ‘dynamic pricing.’ After dreary Manchester City fans Oasis last month announced a comeback tour to fill their apparently barren coffers, demand was so high that it drove the official prices up to the staggering levels that their admirers are for some reason prepared to pay.

There’s an argument that this is capitalism in perfect working order, merely generating cash flow to serve the whims of consumer desire. Everybody’s happy, except for those fans who can’t afford the prices that the market has dictated that Oasis are supposedly worth. You can also argue that it’s an already filthy rich rock band squeezing their fans for every last cent in their pockets, exploiting the dubious notion that this will be a once-in-a-lifetime Event so memorable that it’s possibly worth going into debt.

No one’s forced to go and listen to Oasis, and thank the high heavens for that. Their eye-watering ticket prices are, however, a trend that’s already coming to a soccer club near you. Last week, Spanish club Valencia announced that “following the global trend in shows, sporting events and entertainment, Valencia will join this practice [dynamic pricing], which has the support and technology of La Liga.”

“Those [fans] who can will bear it,” a spokesperson for Valencia supporters’ group Libertad VCF told the BBC, “and those who cannot will have their seat taken by a tourist who does not care whether Valencia wins or loses.” It’s the looming next step of the trend already set in the past few seasons by the Premier League — to cater for the wealthier demographic at the expense of English soccer’s traditional working-class fan base, with the atmosphere in stadiums audibly suffering as a consequence. You can bet that many other clubs and soccer federations will be keeping a very close eye on the Valencia model.

A few years ago, when soccer’s broadcast contracts started going through the roof and you could watch your team live on TV every week, the received wisdom was that ticket prices would plummet as clubs struggled to lure fans into the stadium at all. It turns out, though, that this was a lazy stereotype about lazy fans, and that many supporters still love to get off the sofa and cheer their teams on for real. What luck for the clubs, which now milk the cash cow for cheese and butter too.

My home team Eintracht Frankfurt used to sell out its two home games against Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund. On any other Bundesliga Saturday, you could roll up at the stadium and still expect to get in. In recent years, that’s all changed, despite the club just having increased its stadium capacity to 58,000. There are 35,000 season-ticket holders and 6,000 tickets allocated to away support, leaving 17,000 tickets up for grabs — to club members only. There are now 140,000 club members (€76 a year), as locals have worked out it’s the only way to have the chance of seeing their team. All home games are now sold out just minutes after tickets go on sale.

Does this mean that Eintracht has its eye on dynamic pricing? Thankfully, the club is choosing another way. Club chairman Axel Hellmann last year expressed the misty-eyed expectation that the extra standing capacity would —  just like in the old days — allow parents to spontaneously announce to their kids the night before the game that tomorrow they’d all be going to the stadium.

The ongoing high demand has crushed that hope. So now the club has decided to release 1,000 tickets per game to local clubs and schools a few days prior to home matches. For free.

The idea is to keep the fan base young, with a strong nod to the historic experience of many fans in any given sport — the thrill of your first visit to the stadium with an older family member that marks out many as supporters for the coming decades. It’s a minor loss in revenue over the course of a season, but an investment in future loyalty. And a signal that in this particular arena, there is no justification for exclusion — a soccer team belongs to its city and everyone who lives there, not just wealthy travelers or the people who can outbid their neighbors.

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