IT’S the poshest, most exclusive and expensive stand in the Premier League.
Bring your Speedos for a half-time dip in an open-air swimming pool, indulge your taste buds with a spot of lobster in a high-class restaurant, enjoy a drink on a roof-top bar overlooking the Thames.
Dave Kidd visited Fulham’s new exclusive stand
The Sun’s Chief Sports Writer paid £105 for his ticket with his son’s priced at £85
The Riverside Stand has been six years in the making
There is a children’s entertainer on site
Fulham’s Riverside Stand – which took six years to complete at a cost of £100million – is like a cross between a swanky West End private members’ club and a prep-school fete.
It’s football, but not as we know it.
Upstairs in the Sky Deck, where the pool is due to open this year, Michelin-starred chefs add the quality sadly lacking on the pitch as Fulham produce their worst performance of the season in a 2-0 defeat by Crystal Palace and fail to register a single shot on target.
There are three posh restaurants – according to the club’s website, these include ‘cool-looking chefs, big knives, lots of energy’. Perhaps the players could learn from their sharpness and work rate.
I’m downstairs in the Riverside’s ‘cheap seats’ – my ticket cost £105 and for Manchester United’s visit last month it would have set me back a whopping £160.
Non-corporate season tickets are priced up to £3,000. For the winers and diners in the upper tier, it can be 15 grand a pop.
On Fulham’s website the club’s owner-chairman Shahid Khan boasts: “Make no mistake, the Riverside development will be a location like no other, a real game-changer for Fulham Football Club, our neighbourhood and all of London.”
He’s not wrong. I’ve been a regular match-going fan at Craven Cottage for 44 years and I’ve never experienced anything remotely like this.
As we enter the ground, a woman dispenses cups of mulled wine and Bailey’s hot chocolate – although more traditional beer and Bovril is still available.
Meanwhile, children are amused by a conjurer performing card tricks and a bloke making animals out of balloons.
We’re then offered a free muffin, there are charging ports for our phones and also padded seats – ideal for when your team suffers the mother of all off-days and does nothing to keep you on the edge of them.
The Riverside’s construction began in 2019 and its phased opening is still continuing at the tail end of this season. This will soon include a hotel and health club, with the outdoor pool.
Major delays were caused by the Covid pandemic and the fact that building contractors, the Buckingham Group, went into administration with the project incomplete.
The stand’s target audience is clearly city types on expenses in the top tier, then international tourists, who surround me, in the two lower tiers.
Here, there are one-off punters from the United States, the Far East and eastern Europe.
While the views and facilities are excellent, only a small minority of Riversiders are wearing any club colours and, throughout the entire 90 minutes, there is virtually no singing or even shouting from the Riversiders.
This is in stark contrast to the punters in the Hammersmith End, where I normally sit, who sing until Palace take the lead, then moan their hearts out until full-time, as I would usually be doing.
My own season tickets behind the goal are reasonably priced, working out at just over 30 quid a match for myself and a little less for my 19-year-old son, James, who gets a ‘young adult’ concession. Until he turned 18, his season ticket cost only £100.
Although the facilities in the Hammy End are cramped and shabby – it is impossible to get to the toilet and buy a drink at half-time.
Fulham, while wildly inconsistent, are enjoying one of the best spells in their history under manager Marco Silva. Before Saturday’s dismal no-show, they looked primed for European qualification.
Ticket prices for the new stand have been met with opposition from some Fulham fans
Season tickets for the top tier cost £15,000
Mulled wine and Bailey’s hot chocolate are on offer
There is a concern the next generation of Fulham supporters could be priced out
There is a swimming pool situated on top of the stand that will be opening soon
GettyPalace’s Jean-Philippe Mateta celebrates on a miserable day for Fulham[/caption]
Yet the pricing of tickets in the Riverside has caused genuine controversy among the fanbase – something of a class war.
Fulham’s long-serving chief executive Alistair Mackintosh has been targeted by critical chanting in recent weeks.
Contrary to widespread perception – West Ham fans, in particular, usually serenade us with ‘Does your butler know you’re here?’ – most Fulham supporters aren’t remotely posh or seriously wealthy.
It’s an image which makes most of us cringe. And the luxuries of the Riverside only propagate the idea of a high-end ‘boutique’ football club.
The counter-argument is that Fulham are a small Premier League outfit. In the 1980s and early 90s, crowds averaged around 4,500.
That fanbase has grown steadily during a rise from the Football League basement to the top half of the Premier League.
The club now has a record number of 15,000 season-ticket holders, with 1,000 more on a waiting list. The away section houses 2,700 travelling fans, while the Cottage’s capacity has reached 29,589.
How to fill those remaining seats, including many of the 8,000 in the Riverside?
With easily affordable prices to help attract the next generation of regular match-goers, or genuine fans who attend only occasionally?
Or by charging premium rates for city types and tourists?
The Cottage is virtually always a sell-out for league matches – and the Riverside sold out for the Palace fixture before any of the other three substantially cheaper stands. So, on one level, the current pricing policy is working.
The Premier League is a global phenomenon and London is a major tourist destination.
The fanbases of Arsenal, Tottenham, Chelsea and West Ham are significantly larger than Fulham’s. Brentford’s ground is much smaller and Palace’s Selhurst Park, while atmospheric, doesn’t offer anything like the facilities or the Thames-side location of the Cottage.
If you’re visiting the capital on holiday from overseas, you are far more likely to pay more to splash out £100 a seat for a one-off match, than an occasional match-going fan or the kind of family with kids who might be sucked into a lifetime of the masochistic pain-and-pleasure existence of supporting Fulham.
So have Khan, Mackintosh & Co spotted a lucrative gap in the market or are they selling out the soul of London’s oldest football club?
The club’s argument has been consistent – that they still have the fourth-smallest stadium in the top flight and are competing with clubs whose grounds are twice the size.
That they must therefore increase revenue through all available streams to keep the team competitive and comply with Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules.
The result is an experience quite unlike anything else in the Premier League – very pleasant, if you ignore the actual football, but really rather alien to us old-school spit-and-sawdust types.
I’ll be back on more familiar territory behind the goal for my next visit to the Cottage.
But I’ll be waiting for that pool to open and for the inevitable chants from opposition fans of ‘You only sing when you’re swimming!’
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