Dynamic ticket pricing in the Premier League: Leeds United chief taking us for mugs

Leeds United are getting a lot right at the moment, which must be oddly unsettling for fans of a club more accustomed to shooting itself in the balls. So perhaps it felt reassuring familiar when Paraag Marathe took aim at his own swingers on stage at Leaders Week London on Thursday morning.

This is what the Leeds chairman told a room full of sports business types… "Off the pitch, something that I've been thinking about is pricing tickets in the stadium doing dynamic pricing, similar to how the airline industry does it. There's probably an opportunity to do it in a way that does increase revenue, but also makes it affordable for your most hardcore fans.

Here, we should state that last line, apparently, was delivered with a straight face rather than a wink to his knowing audience. Not just to make to maximise price, but if there's a way to truly dynamically price based on your supporters - how frequently they go and how much they transact and interact with the club - we can make it more affordable for those folks or certain seats where it's a little bit more of a hospitality corporate area.

Even right now as we dynamically price, we don't really use AI. We don't let it make the decision for us; we just do it in tiers based on what we think.

For f***'s sake… In fairness, Marathe is only saying out loud what other chairmen will be thinking. Having observed in the last two years how the practice has gouged everyone shopping for in-demand tickets, be itfor World Cup gamesor music gigs, it is sadly inevitable that the Premier League, an entity already eating itself, wants a piece of the dynamically-priced pie.

Where Marathe and his mates can f*** off and keep f***ing off is the suggestion that any of this will 'make it affordable for your most hardcore fans'. Marathe knows that Leeds, like many Premier League clubs, sell out every week.

While that remains the case, with dynamic pricing, prices would only ever surge."