Arsenal Football Club have announced on their website that they will be freezing ticket prices at the Emirates for the 2015/16 season.
Chief executive Ivan Gazidis said:
“We have fantastic support with all our home games selling out week after week, year after year.
"The Arsenal board, as always, works to strike a balance between the expense of coming to games for our supporters and the club’s ever-increasing costs and expenditure as it develops on and off the pitch.”
It's a sensible move on this occasion to freeze the prices, if there had been another increase it certainly would have prompted complaints from the season's ticket holders and game attending fans at the very least.
This decision will certainly ease the ever increasing pressure and protests from those who currently feel they are paying extortionate prices. However, the club would be extremely naive if they think freezing ticket prices for a year will eradicate the bad blood already formed from previous disagreements over pricing.
It has been ten years since the Gunners left their home in Highbury to move into a stadium that had the potential to be a great start to the future but sadly the 'Soulless bowl' hasn't lived up to the expectations of what fans were promised, and the fans paid the cost and bore the brunt of the unsuccessful years that followed.
We were promised £10 tickets, more trophies, better players brought in and instead we have one trophy in ten years and a library of 'mistakes' that were drafted in whilst our stars were sold and we're left wondering why were are still paying the highest price in the league to see a team who haven't won the title in ten years.
Whilst fans should be grateful the club at last have acknowledged and rewarded' them with a price freeze, there are still a lot of arguments of whether they are still getting value for money? If every game was played like Arsenal's fixture against City the fans would not care how much they paid for their tickets, but the fact is the football has been placating, maybe even declining, so there haven't been many games worth the steep prices, especially Manchester United at catagory A prices last year.
This gesture will go a long way to building bridges but Arsenal will still have to make more of an effort to appreciate their fans in the future because soon those tickets won't sell out on a weekly basis but for now the price freeze is the best they can expect, providing they actually stick to it.