Andrew Smith: Celtic and Rangers are biggest offenders when it comes to virtual season tickets

It takes real chutzpah to charge punters for seats they’ll not be sitting on before 2021

Celtic fans protest over the cost of watching football in Scotland during a game against Ross County last year.

In truth, there is something of the old American West medicine shows about the trumpeting of the virtual season tickets now being flogged by Scotland’s top-flight clubs.

Roll up! Roll up! Have yourself a two-dimensional telly experience in your front room for, why, merely the cost of what only last season you paid for a fully immersive football experience in a stadium populated by thousands of passionate like-minds. Who can resist? Well, not that many, it would surprisingly seem.

It is remarkable that season-ticket sales appear to be more than holding up across the Premiership clubs pushing them – Hamilton Accies, Ross County and St Johnstone so far standing apart from the other nine over the awkwardness of asking people to fork out for a leisure pursuit that cannot be properly provided.

Rangers have frozen the prices of their season tickets.

The potential for Covid-19 restrictions to demand that games across the first third of the season be played without spectators – if indeed the campaign does indeed kick off in the first weekend of August – seems to have been deemed largely irrelevant by Scotland’s leading clubs when setting out their season-ticket pricing structures.

Yes, yes, we know that football has been battered by the economic effects of the global health pandemic. But still. It takes real chutzpah – or real desperation, or real exploitation of supporters’ emotional attachment to their clubs – to charge punters for seats in stadiums they may well not be planking their backsides on before 2021.

As the biggest beasts and the biggest draws in Scotland, Celtic and Rangers are the biggest offenders when it comes to seeking to extract the same from their fanbase for (much) less.

The Ibrox club have frozen the prices of their season tickets – how big of them – while Celtic have had the temerity to impose a tiny increase. This is the same Celtic, it should be noted, that slashed £100 from their season tickets in the first year that there was no Rangers in the top flight. Go figure. And then go and tell any of those pious Parkhead punters that swear blind their fiscal model isn’t impacted upon by their rivalry with a club from the south of the city to take a long, hard look at themselves.

Now, when there will be no freebie home friendly in July, and possibly no home cup game that also tends to be thrown into the package – never mind no games to go to for the next four months – somehow Celtic are looking for their supporters to pay more for the privilege of owning a season ticket.

The outcry from a selection of the faithful has been ferocious. One poster to a forum set out how he pays almost £2,000 for three season tickets, the outlay covering himself and his two, still at home, sons in their early 20s.

What it means is that, for every game they have streamed to their homes in the early part of the season, they will be paying almost £100 to huddle round the computer. To put that in context, for his entire Sky package – all 10 sports channels, movies, variety, and all in HD – he pays £106 a month. Or, to give further context, the three are boxing fans and felt a bit stiffed when the pay-per-view charge for the Wilder-Fury fight in February was ramped up from the normal cost for such events. It was £25 as opposed to the typical £20 level.

There have been certain recognitions from clubs of the extraordinary circumstances that Scottish football will find itself in when matches are played without supporters in attendance.

Motherwell have pledged that any supporters buying season tickets will “get the chance to attend 19 home league games, whenever that is possible”. That means the costs of any streamed games as a consequence of social-distancing measures this year will be offset against what they would be charged for a season ticket in 2021-22.

Dundee United have a less generous, but still welcome, version of this scheme. For every game their season-ticket holders need to watch from their couch beyond three, they will receive a 1/19th credit for their season ticket the following season.

Such acknowledgments of the unfortunate situation, and the attendant depression it creates in the value for money that season tickets offer, represents the sort of innovative thinking we were told would be required in this crisis. Alas, for too many others, innovation seems to have been drained along with their bank balances.