Liverpool and Manchester United heading for Bangkok – at a big cost

Pre-season tours are back next month, with Liverpool and Manchester United bringing a taste of north-west England to south-east Asia. “For this part of the world, these are the two single biggest football clubs – we couldn’t get anything bigger,” Marcus Luer, the CEO of Total Sports Asia, who brokered the deal to bring the teams to Thailand, says. “This is the biggest match ever in Asia – the revenue will be the highest in Asia.”

The rivals meet in ‘The Match: Bangkok Century Cup’ on 12 July at the Rajamangala Stadium, one of Asia’s iconic arenas, where the best way to arrive is to take a motorbike taxi from the closest station and weave in and out of the traffic in the Thai capital with thousands of fellow fans. If that offers a thrilling taste of Thai football culture, the price of entry would make even Premier League fans in England wince, notwithstanding the promotors Fresh Air Festival putting on a pre-match appearance from the K-Pop star Jackson Wang. The cheapest tickets at the 51,000-capacity venue are 5,000 baht (£115), about 60 times more than fans pay to get into Thai Premier League matches, and most cost considerably more.

“I don’t make enough money to spend 10,000 baht on a football match,” the local Liverpool fan Thesis Laohajarastsang says. “Prices are too high as the average salary here is around 30,000 baht per month. I understand the cost of hosting the event is up in the tens or hundreds of millions range, but most Thai football fans cannot afford to attend the match. I feel for the diehards who will be forced to watch the game on television.”

European teams have often been guilty of overstating their popularity across Asia but Thailand is a country where Liverpool and Manchester United do have