EXCLUSIVE: Football ticket pricing set by AI - expert weighs in on controversial plan

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FT Desk

Dynamic pricing became a topic of conversation during the 2026 FIFA World Cup as football supporters were left paying exorbitant amounts for match tickets.

High demand led to ticket prices skyrocketing, while lower demand meant that ticket prices were reduced. As it was the World Cup, however, the interest in the vast majority of fixtures meant that prices remained consistently high.

Leeds United are hoping to catalyse a new initiative so that loyal supporters perhaps don't pay as much as casual fans, as they may introduce AI-powered dynamic pricing.

“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,” club chairman Paraag Marathe said at a sports conference in London last week.

“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.

“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."

Should Leeds implement this strategy and it proves to be a success, other clubs could follow

To try and make sense of it all, FootballTransfers sat down for an exclusive interview with ticketing expert Jim McCarthy, the owner of Impresario, a company that aims to help organisations maximise revenue by ensuring as many tickets as possible are sold for events. This includes work with football clubs.

FootballTransfers: Last week, Leeds' CEO said Leeds were planning to use AI-driven dynamic pricing for Premier League games going forward. His view is that it would keep loyal customers onside while charging people who might be day-trippers a different price. What do you think about Leeds’ plan? Do you think that’s the way Premier League teams will move in the future, and do you think it’s already in place at some clubs?

Jim McCarthy: I read the article, and it was based on comments he made at the Leaders conference, if I’m not mistaken. I take it with a grain of salt because everything sounded very tentative: “We might do this, it could do that, maybe it’ll do this."

If we assume it will work the way he says, then AI, machine learning, or any algorithm you devise for ticket pricing will do what you tell it to do. It responds to the structure it’s given.

If they want to reward loyalty, they can certainly do that in several ways. But that doesn’t really require AI. It just requires a programmatic decision to recognise a customer’s status based on how often they’ve purchased tickets, how old their season ticket is, or something similar, and then price accordingly.

You can do that with a human-driven system or a very simple computer system. These days, people say “AI” when they’re really just describing computers. Computers have been able to do this for a long time.

AI is the buzzword they want to use, but they certainly could build a system that rewards loyalty. Whether they actually do it is up to them.

FootballTransfers: I agree with you that the way he presented it was just an idea. But it’s still worth considering, especially given how much we talked about dynamic pricing over the summer and how much AI is now at the forefront of everyone’s minds. It would be naive to think Leeds are the only club considering this.

Jim McCarthy: You have to tease out the different threads of what he’s saying. Again, I give him a lot of leeway because he was just answering a question at a conference, or perhaps speculating on the topic.

If a club wants to reward loyal ticket buyers, that’s usually a good idea. But dynamic pricing doesn’t inherently have a concept of loyalty. It has a concept of value.

You can program a dynamic system to take loyalty into account, but by its nature, dynamic pricing simply adjusts based on demand. That’s an interesting wrinkle on the idea of dynamic pricing, and it’s worth exploring.

FootballTransfers: You’d need to add additional rules or commands.

Jim McCarthy: Exactly, and the systems are perfectly capable of doing that. In fact, you don’t need dynamic pricing to reward loyalty. If you want to add loyalty rewards to a dynamic pricing system, that’s a good thing, but the two ideas are almost unrelated.

If you let a pricing algorithm respond only to demand, it won’t generally lower prices for people who always buy. In fact, when someone is loyal and buys frequently, that indicates they really like the product. The algorithm might push the price upward because it sees that as a sign of high demand.

So having the system take loyalty into account and blunt that effect could be a good thing.

FootballTransfers: It seems like they had the idea of AI-driven dynamic pricing, but then had to qualify it by saying, “Don’t worry, it’s for loyal customers.”

Jim McCarthy: Right. If that comes to pass, it would be an interesting variation on generic dynamic pricing. But, in my opinion, it has nothing specifically to do with AI. It’s simply a decision they could make.

Jim McCarthy is the founder of Impresario Strategic Growth Service. The co-founder and former CEO of Goldstar and Stellar Live, Jim is the world’s leading authority on audience development for live events organisations. He and his team have supported more than 2,000,000 live events and delivered tens of millions of customers to partners and clients.

His work at Impresario Strategic Growth Service focuses that expertise on professional football clubs around the world, supporting their revenue and audience growth through the Matchday Multiplier program.

Jim also serves on the Advisory Board of the Rose Bowl Institute, the Board of Trustees at the Pasadena Playhouse and is an Expert-in-Residence at the Greif Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California. He graduated from Harvard University and earned an MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA.

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