Avoid These Premier League Stadiums if You Don’t Want to Go Bankrupt

If you’re going to a Premier League game, you’re probably planning on spending a few quid.

Between tickets, trains (or even flights, depending on where you’re coming from), and a couple of pints, you’re likely to reach your budget pretty quickly. The last thing you need is to be paying way too much money for very average food. 

We've seen those infamous photos on X-Formerly-Known-As-Twitter, you know which ones we're talking about. Those poor people snapping a sad-looking pic of a bleak hamburger bun with a drop of some unknown sauce, saying they paid £35 (or whatever) for it at an Arsenal game. 

We're still getting over the fact that we once paid $6 US Dollars for a cup (not a bottle, a cup) of water at a stadium in the US two years ago, so we jumped at the opportunity to find out whether or not other stadiums are just as bad. 

You might do a double take when you see that some stadiums are selling beer for £7.60 a pint. Yep, that’s not a typo. That’s the actual price of a pint of Birra Moretti at the London Stadium. But we're not ones to guess the prices of food and drink, so to get absolutely scientifically correct data, we headed over to Tripadvisor to see what real people were saying. 

We looked for mentions of words like “rip-off,” “expensive,” and “high-priced,” and depending on how many times people called them out, we were able to rank the stadiums and find out exactly which one was the biggest rip-off.

Full rankings are as follows:

We’re sad—but not entirely surprised—to say that the biggest rip-off stadium is, indeed, the London Stadium. And the main reason? Well, it’s all in the name. London is known for being a whole lot more expensive than the rest of the country, so it stands to reason that things might cost a little more here, right? Well, maybe not to this extent. 

The London Stadium received a rating of 8.27%, with 150 mentions of one of our keywords out of just over 1,800 reviews. “The stadium is impressive, the food and drink outlets are vast but far too expensive, you need to remortgage your home for a family day out at the football.” Yikes. 

Our solution? Just don’t be a fan of West Ham—then you’ll never have to go there… and you’ll also not have to support West Ham. Two birds, one stone. 

Second on the list was American Express Stadium, with a rating of 8.19%, and 45 people using the word “expensive.” Firstly, we were a little surprised at this, because it’s in Brighton, and as far as we know, everyone in Brighton is a happy, arty type who would never dream of paying £7 for a pint. But maybe that's wrong. 

Anyway, we took a bit of a deep dive into the reviews to see why people were saying it’s so expensive. According to one review, “Refreshments are only available inside the ground and are what you’d expect—expensive and average quality.” Sounds pretty bleak. 

Coming in third on my list of biggest rip-off stadiums, we have Portman Road, a venue that you’ll be familiar with if you’re a fan of Ipswich Town. To be fair, at this point it just seems like all the stadiums within the vicinity of London are the most expensive.

With a rating of 7.46% on the Rip Off Scale, one person lamented the cost of alcohol-free beer, saying, “£4.50 for a bottle of Peroni Libera is not really on when a pint of beer is £4.80. It does not encourage people to drink responsibly”. Fair point. 

Down at the other end of the scale, there are a couple of stadiums that actually don’t rip fans off. Hard to believe, we know. 

Firstly, we have good news for fans of Bournemouth. Vitality Stadium was ranked as the least expensive Premier League stadium, with a fantastic score of 0%. That’s right, no one used any of our keywords to describe it. 

So, what did people have to say about the 11,000-capacity stadium, formerly known as Dean Court? 

“Small but perfect if you are able to get a seat. Hospitality was excellent, food, service, and wine was very good, and the seats so close to the action”, said one review. Sounds absolutely delightful.

Second from the bottom (which is a good thing, in this case), Aston Villa Stadium got a rating of 0.43%. Only one person called it a rip-off, and six used the word “expensive.” 

One person seemed to summarise it quite well, saying, “The refreshment concourses are superb although, as with all clubs, food and drinks are expensive and overpriced. Just a brilliant club and one of, if not the very best, traditional British football stadiums”. 

So, in other words, a little pricey, but worth it for the experience.

Third from the bottom, Goodison Park, home of Everton, got a rating of 0.62%, with only eight keyword mentions out of just over 1,200 reviews. In fact, we investigated the one mention of “rip off” that we found, and were actually very pleasantly surprised. 

Said the reviewer, “I love that Everton don't rip off their fans by overcharging for this fantastic experience.” That’s big praise for a stadium!

Methodology 

Casinos.com utilized Tripadvisor reviews to do an in-depth analysis of phrases associated with rip-offs to determine the Premier League stadium that is the biggest rip-off. We calculated the percentage of view-related mentions in the total Tripadvisor reviews.

Keywords tracked: rip-off, expensive, high-priced 

Disclaimer 

The data in this article is intended for entertainment purposes only. Casinos.com does not claim any one stadium to be “better” than another. Please don’t use the information presented in this article as gambling or betting advice, and as always, please bet responsibly.

Fair Use Policy

The data and graphics on this page are free to use as long as proper credit is given by linking to the original article.