Although a big fan of the Olympics – the price of travel and accommodation is far too pricey for many fans
July 25, 2024 6:00 am(Updated 6:03 am)
As a huge sports fan, it didn’t bother me that I spent £2,000 at the London 2012 Olympics. As someone born, raised and living in the London borough of Newham, the chance to witness sporting immortality in my own backyard of Stratford in 2012 was irresistible.
Cue a glorious few weeks in London, where I took annual leave from work and emptied my hard-earned cash to attend live events for both the Olympics and Paralympics.
You name a sport and I was probably there. Athletics in the Olympic Stadium, handball at the Copper Box, O2, Greco-Roman wrestling at the Excel Centre. As a huge sports fan, I was prepared for my credit card statement to bulge.
However, I simply refuse to pay the exorbitant cost of travel and hotels to the Paris 2024 games.
What made the expense tolerable in London was knowing I was living with family nearby and could walk or get a cheap London Tube journey to most venues.
After 2016 games were held far away in Rio and the 2020 Tokyo games were hit by the pandemic, Paris 2024, just a jump across the Channel, seemed attractive.
Looking into purchasing tickets, I had been bamboozled by the bizarre ticketing system the French authorities have set up. You have to purchase tickets for a minimum of three separate events.
Although annoying, this in itself wouldn’t have deterred my sporting stubbornness, but the prospective costs of hotels and travel have given me the financial hump.
Eurostar single journeys from St Pancras are up to £300 and decent hotels have exploited demand economics to be priced at around £500 per night.
The Olympic motto is “Citius, Altius, Fortius” which is Latin for “Faster, Higher, Stronger”. I don’t know the Latin for “pricier”, but the Olympic movement could consider adding “Expensivus” to reflect the cost of spectators getting to events.
However, does attending live sport require you to always remortgage your home? No, there are ways of being relatively frugal.
Every other year, I have friends Whatsapping me saying that they caught my face on the BBC attending Centre Court at Wimbledon. Yes, there are pricey ballot tickets, debenture holders and even press passes, but my method involves something more traditional than Friday fish and chips: the Wimbledon queue.
Me and whichever family member I can drag along, leave at the crack of dawn to join the queue for a £30 Wimbledon ground pass (think Henman Hill). Eventually we join another queue for resale tickets for Centre Court. Usually around 6pm, I get to stroll into Centre Court for an additional £15.
Compared to my Olympics experience, football in London is somehow a relatively more affordable proposition. As an east Londoner, I was only ever going to bleed the claret and blue of football club West Ham.
My family have shared a pair of club season tickets for over two decades. It works out historically at about £500 for me, given the amount of games I attend.
Since I’ve become an education ambassador for West Ham’s charitable foundation, I was fortunate enough to celebrate with the club’s first team players on the balcony of Old Stratford Town Hall as we lifted our first major silverware since 1980 in 2023 with the Europa Conference League. This was most certainly a money can’t buy experience.
With the women’s football game, I have managed to snag tickets for as low as £20 for the FA Cup final at Wembley. Though I paid substantially more to cry into my overpriced Wembley Stadium beer as our men’s team lost on penalties to Italy in Euro 2020.
In behavioural economics, academics like to assume that us consumers behave rationally and are not swayed by emotion in our purchasing decisions. Try telling that to the Taylor Swift fans who spent on average, according to Barclays, £850 to attend her gigs in the UK. For me, sport is my financial vice. For others, it could be following their music idols at sell out concerts or West End theatre productions.
Inflation has remained doggedly above the Bank of England’s official target. Part of that reason is due to what I’ve seen termed as “treatonomics”, where consumers prioritise expenditure on fun and uplifting activities. This obviously means cutting back elsewhere (Lidl rather than Waitrose for me) and perhaps collectively has meant central bank interest rates won’t drop back down as quickly as we hope.
It has reminded me of the 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Author Oscar Wilde famously wrote, “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Yes, I am sometimes prepared to pay beyond the odds for attending live sport like at London 2012.
The memories (and the photos to show off) last a lifetime. But other times, like Paris 2024, costs mean that I am forced to re-acquaint myself with the distinction between foil and sabre fencing from the comfort of my living room sofa.