This week, BBC Sport reported that families are being priced out of the London Diamond League — the UK’s flagship athletics event — with tickets described as “exorbitant” and analysis showing London charges significantly more than equivalent events elsewhere. At Wimbledon, Delhi Capitals co-owner Parth Jindal took to X to note he had “never seen so many empty seats at Wimbledon, that too on a Sunday,” adding that prices were “beyond all comprehension this year.” His post went viral. The reaction suggested he was not alone.
Both stories landed in the same week that Silverstone broke its Formula 1 attendance record, welcoming 564,000 fans over the weekend. The contrast is worth reflecting on. Silverstone has built an experience that extends well beyond the race itself — music, comedy, camping, a genuine festival atmosphere across three days. Whether that fully explains the difference in fortunes is impossible to say. But it raises an important question: at what point does the price of admission outstrip the value of the experience in the customer’s mind — and how would you know before the seats start to empty?
The Number Nobody Is Looking At
We understand why this happens. Sports organisations are under real cost pressure — energy, wages, infrastructure — and passing some of that on to the audience that already shows up feels like the rational response. In the short term, the numbers support it. Yield per seat increases. Revenue holds. The board is satisfied.
What is almost never visible at that point is the long-term consequence. The family priced out of the Diamond League this summer is not just a lost ticket sale. They are a lapsed fan in ten years. The child who finds something else to do on a Saturday and never comes back. The future season ticket holder, the future participant, the future sponsor’s target customer — drifting away quietly before anyone notices.
The Football Supporters Association has called football ticket pricing “a ticking time bomb” for years. Against the backdrop of a prolonged cost of living crisis, the fuse is getting shorter.
What Good Decision-Making Looks Like
The reason this keeps happening is not that sports organisations don’t care about their fans. It is that they are making pricing decisions without the data to understand the full consequence.
According to our forthcoming Sports Leadership Benchmark — due to publish in September — 66% of UK sports rights-holders still do not measure customer lifetime value, with lack of customer data, expertise and resource cited as the primary reasons. In other words, two thirds of the industry is making pricing decisions without the single most important piece of commercial information available to them.
Without customer lifetime value modelling, a price increase looks like this: revenue goes up, decision looks correct, repeat next year. The long-term fan attrition is invisible because nobody is measuring it.
With CLV modelling, the same decision looks very different. You can see which audience segments are most price-sensitive, what proportion are likely to churn at a given price point, and what the lifetime value of those lost relationships actually represents. Suddenly the short-term revenue gain sits next to a long-term cost — and the conversation in the boardroom changes completely.
This is not primarily a technology problem. For most organisations it is a question of priorities — the commercial model has long defaulted to selling what is available, to whoever will pay, right now. That is entirely understandable given the short-term pressures most face. But it is a framework that makes the long-term cost of pricing decisions almost impossible to see.
The empty seats at Wimbledon and the families turned away from the Diamond League are not inevitable. They are the result of decisions made without the full picture. The organisations willing to build that picture — and make pricing decisions that protect the long-term relationship as well as the short-term revenue line — will have a very different story to tell in ten years.
The third edition of our Sports Leadership Benchmark publishes in September. Get in touch if you’d like to receive it on publication.
