Comment: Great price should be the only incentive of West Brom's early-bird season tickets

Freezing the prices for another year, regardless of which division the club are in, after dropping them to their cheapest level in a decade, will be welcomed by thousands.

Albion’s seats are incredibly competitive for either of the top two tiers.

Only five clubs in the Championship have a lower price this season than the £329 adult ticket for behind the goals.

Only three clubs – Huddersfield, Manchester City and West Ham – offer a cheaper seat in the top tier and one of those looks destined for relegation.

If Albion do go up, supporters will be watching Premier League football for less than they ever did during the previous eight-year stint.

Compare that to Albion's rivals Wolves, who increased adult seats behind the goals by 30 per cent last summer following promotion from £345 to £449.

If the Baggies stay in the second tier, the volume of games means adults can pay the equivalent of £14.31 a game. That’s cheaper than a lot of non-league grounds.

The pricing should be applauded, but there were a number of ‘incentives’ in the scheme that on closer inspection, raised eyebrows.

Firstly, the club revealed that any fans who do not renew before the end of April deadline could risk losing their seat to someone else.

This will have come as quite a shock to supporters preparing to renew at a later date and gives them just a couple of months to find the money.

For families of three or four, that could be more than £1,000, and that amount of cash will not be readily available for everyone in the next two months.

There are two ways of securing your seat without forking out a lump sum. The first is by entering the direct debit scheme, although that adds £20-£30 on to each seat.

The second is by taking out the Albion Mastercard. That allows you to spread the cost of the season ticket across nine months interest free – but whether fans struggling to afford seats should be taking out a credit card is another matter.

This problem could have been solved by giving fans a chance to 'save their seat' until the end of June, and the opportunity to pay the higher price for it after the early-bird deadline.

Early-bird tickets should just incentivise supporters to buy them, not punish those who don't.

The second ‘incentive’ to buy early came from the 1,000 loyalty points that would be immediately accrued when buying or renewing a season ticket.

This means those who buy early could leapfrog those who don't in the pecking order for potentially crucial away games this season such as the trip to Derby on the final day or the away leg of a play-off semi-final.

Each fan gets just five points for going to an away game, so the scheme has always been heavily loaded towards home fans anyway.

It’s important to clarify this will not allow completely new season ticket holders to jump the queue for those games.

Supporters with season tickets for the last two seasons who renew with the early bird prices will be top of the tree with 2,500 points (plus any extra from away games).

Supporters with season tickets for last two seasons who do not renew early will have 1,500 points. New season ticket holders for next season will have just 1,000 points.

But it does appear to strong-arm away fans into renewing their home season ticket early – because it essentially renders those points gleaned from away games this season as useless come May.

If they don't, they risk losing priority for those big games at the end of the season to season ticket holders who have renewed but don’t have as much history of travelling away.

How many fans are realistically affected by this is unknown, and it's unlikely to be too many, but giving early-bird holders an extra 1,000 loyalty points now seems an unnecessary complication that wasn't fully thought out.

This week’s release coincided with the news the players would receive a £10million promotion bonus spread across the squad should they go up.

Every club in the Championship will have such a promotion bonus in place, and players being paid extortionate amounts of cash is nothing new.

But that will rankle with fans who, at the same time, are being asked to stump up their cash early.

For the vast majority, these are minor issues compared to the overriding good news that the cheapest season ticket prices in a decade have been frozen, and there were plenty of first-day renewals.

But the incentives for the early-bird scheme should have stopped at offering a great price.