Cod Almighty | Diary

Licence to shill

25 July 2025

For the second week in a row your A46 Diary is using Manchester United as source material. This week it's the news that securing a seat in their new 100,000-seat stadium could cost up to £4000. Expensive for a seat, obviously, but that's not the final figure. The £4k merely gives a supporter the opportunity to buy a season ticket. It's very clever, very strategic, very American.

It is, of course, based on an American model and so gets its own three-letter abbreviation as well: a PSL, or Personal Seat Licence. A licence for fun! And, hey, the payment is just a one-off, and it lasts for 30 years, so not that onerous, surely, and, right or wrong, it'll be the only way to guarantee your seat. Or guarantee the opportunity for further payment to possess the seat for the season. Miss one season and the licence is revoked.

The club has been in the news several times in the last couple of years for cancelling season tickets of those who fail to attend at least 16 matches in a season or even those who miss five games in a row. This has led to stories about fans with health or logistical issues having their tickets cancelled, including one chap who, due to dementia, still has a paper season ticket with which he had to scan a QR code as proof of attendance. Tech issues and some confusion on the part of the supporter meant that he was marked as absent even though he was there, resulting in the club cancelling his ticket and reselling it. This particular example has since been dealt with, but the stress is very real: elite clubs are no longer the pastimes and pleasures of ordinary people. The clubs are no longer identities to which supporters feel they belong, but commodities in which they may feel they could invest.

Investment, however, is not something that is open to all. Investment is and always has been a wall for which many cannot find a ladder.

Financial barriers are ever-present, leisure and luxuries things that must be earned, things that should be earned, therefore things that are deserved - the circuses that go with the bread. For decades a season ticket has been an expression not just of a desire for pastimes and pleasures but of loyalty, of family, of belonging. If only those who can invest will be present then that family will break up, dissolve, only connect through resentful, spiteful skypes at Christmas. Financial barriers, whether we like it or not, are ever-present, but must they be so high?

Anyway, a new kit yesterday that's as beautiful as anything we've produced in years (your A46 Diary is aware of the irony here). Peterborough tomorrow for another friendly and then into the final countdown before the start of a new circus for which, for now, we will have seats in which we belong. More acrobats and high-fliers and fewer clowns, please.