EDDIE Taylor, a 55-year-old service engineer from Whitefield, has been a Manchester United supporter for 42 years. He is a religious follower of his team. For the past five years, he has also ensured that his 19-year-old son did not miss a home game. This year, however, they have made a difficult decision. For the first time, they are splitting a £380 season ticket between them.

“We flip a coin and I go to one home match and my lad goes to the next,” he said.

“European matches are the same and we don’t buy anything at the ground. Last season I worked out that for just home matches, it was in all £1,500. I can’t afford it.”

Taylor’s story is familiar as another football season gets under way accompanied by signs that fans are starting to turn their backs on Premiership clubs because of rising costs. An attendance of only 29,575 turned up at Stamford Bridge last week to watch Chelsea play Anderlecht in a Champions League group match for which the cheapest walk-up ticket was £48. The Premiership champions’ ground can hold 42,500.

José Mourinho, the Chelsea manager, admitted that tickets were too expensive. Yesterday, Joe Cole, the midfield player, joined in the criticism of high prices. “The club have got to find a way of filling the ground,” Cole said. “The normal fan cannot afford the ticket prices and we have to work with the schools and try and bring more people in.”

With more matches than ever broadcast live on television, combined with the sporting diversion of England winning the Ashes (just £10 for a whole day’s entertainment for the fifth days at the Old Trafford and Oval Tests), the 2005-06 season has started slowly, with average Barclays Premiership attendances about 4.5 per cent down year-on-year.

The FA Premier League is refusing to panic. For every anecdote like Taylor’s, the collective of the top 20 English clubs has a statistic to prove that its product is as popular as ever. Last season, the clubs operated at a 94.2 per cent occupancy rate, compared with 82 per cent in Germany and 70 per cent in Spain, where prices are lower.

The Football Supporters’ Federation (FSF) accuses the Premier League of complacency and gives warning of an ageing audience. “We are at the beginning of the downward slope on the graph,” Malcolm Clarke, the FSF chairman, said. “The danger is that the next generation will be TV-watching, replica shirt-wearers who don’t actually go to games.”

The big leap in the cost of attendance happened some time ago, with the introduction of all-seat stadiums after the Hillsborough disaster, which claimed the lives of 96 fans. However, Lord Justice Taylor, who conducted the 1989 government inquiry, said that the elimination of traditional terraces should not equal huge price increases.

“He said a reasonable price for sitting down to watch football was £6,” Clarke said. “With inflation, that’s about £11. You cannot sit anywhere in the Premiership for anything remotely approaching that price.”

The problem for the Premier League is that it is about to embark on the process of selling its media rights beyond 2007 and cannot yet know how much it will earn for its clubs. Media analysts are predicting that it will not secure as much as the £340 million a year at present paid by BSkyB because the European Commission is forcing the sale of live rights to more than one broadcaster under the next deal.

With a possible reduction in media income, clubs will rely even more heavily on the gate. In the meantime, they may find that even the most passionate supporters fall away.