Burger Index: Boreham Wood

Disclosure: The Pyramid holds a pitchside sponsorship at Meadow Park. Admission for this fixture was complimentary; the prices recorded here are the published general admission prices.

The index entry

The burger

It arrived looking considerably better than it ate. The quarter pound patty had proper colour on it, the griddled onions were piled on generously enough to spill out of the bun, and the floury bap carried grill marks that suggested someone had bothered. All the visual signals were right.

What followed was unremarkable in the way most football burgers are unremarkable. Not dry, not greasy, not underseasoned exactly, but with nothing in it that lingered. The onions did the heavy lifting, as they usually do. 7.3 is a fair reflection of a burger that promised more than it delivered — ahead of Hampton & Richmond's 7.2, some way short of Fisher's 8.3 and Tottenham's 8.2, and in a different league entirely from Dagenham & Redbridge's 4.8.

The price list, read as a financial document

The board at Meadow Park is one of the more coherent the index has photographed. A quarter pounder is £6.00 and the cheeseburger £6.50, so cheese costs 50p. Doubling the patty to a half pounder costs £1.50, and adding cheese to that costs the same 50p again. The increments hold. That sounds like a low bar until you compare it with grounds where the plain burger and the cheeseburger cost the same, which removes any reason to order the cheaper one.

Chips are £3.00, chicken strips and chips £8.00, a hot dog £6.00, a veggie burger £6.00. Hot drinks and soft drinks are both £3.00, bottled water £2.00, chocolate and sweets £2.00. Nothing on the board is priced to shock, and nothing is priced to tempt either.

The Moretti is where it gets interesting. At £6.00 a pint, a National League club charges exactly what Raynes Park Vale and Hampton & Richmond charge, and £3.50 more than Racing Club Warwick's £2.50. The burger tells the same story: £6.00 at Boreham Wood, £6.00 at Raynes Park Vale, £6.00 at Racing Club Warwick.

Across the grounds the Burger Index has visited, catering prices have shown markedly less variation than admission prices. Boreham Wood is a particularly clear example, with a £6.00 burger and a £6.00 Moretti matching clubs two and three tiers below while charging more than twice their admission. That is a pattern in what supporters are charged, not a claim about what any of these clubs pay to stock a kitchen.

The £3 that falls hardest on the youngest

Boreham Wood froze general admission for 2026/27, announcing in July that prices would stay unchanged so supporters could keep enjoying matches "at the same great value," and tying the decision to making football "as accessible and affordable as possible."

The structure underneath that freeze is worth looking at. Every ticket rises by a flat £3.00 from midnight on the day before the match. Because it is flat rather than proportional, it lands very unevenly:

An adult who turns up on the day pays 15% more. A child of nine pays 50% more. The intent is obvious enough and not sinister: the surcharge exists to push people into booking ahead, which helps the club plan staffing and stewarding and smooths its cash. Plenty of clubs do it. But a flat surcharge applied across a graduated price list quietly reverses the graduation, and it does so hardest on exactly the tickets the concession structure was designed to protect. A percentage-based surcharge would preserve the relative differences between categories, although its overall revenue effect would depend on the rate and the mix of tickets sold.

£35 for the evening

Admission, a burger and a pint of Moretti cost £35.00 at Meadow Park. Set against the rest of the index, that is near the top. Sutton United — against Boreham Wood, as it happens — came to £38.40 with a £24.00 ticket, an £8.50 rib cap burger and a £5.90 pint. Hampton & Richmond was £26.00, Raynes Park Vale £22.00 and Racing Club Warwick £16.50. Fisher was £15.00, less than half what Meadow Park costs, for a burger that scored a point better.

What the club earns, and where

Boreham Wood Football Club Limited (company number 02533129, incorporated 1990) filed abridged unaudited accounts for the year to 30 June 2025 showing net assets of £3.177m, up marginally from £3.164m, and cash at bank of £2.387m against £2.401m. Net current assets were £2.507m, tangible fixed assets £671,000, and creditors falling due after more than one year £8,987. The filing is abridged, so there is no profit and loss account and no turnover figure. What it does show is a materially stronger balance sheet than most non-league clubs carry. Those figures predate both the Abdulmalik transfer and the proposed stadium redevelopment, and they do not establish current liquidity or the economics of any individual matchday.

Danny Hunter is registered at Companies House as holding at least 75% of voting rights with the right to appoint and remove directors, and the club's own statement under FA rule 2.13 describes his control as resting on "his majority shareholding and financial commitment."

Around that sits a revenue base assembled largely away from the turnstile. The ground carries naming rights as the Mangata Developments Stadium Meadow Park. Arsenal's women's team use the site. And in August the club sold Abdulmalik for a reported initial £1.5m having signed him for nothing, though transfer proceeds are frequently staged or contingent and a headline fee is not the same as cash received.

Then there is the ground itself. Hertsmere Borough Council has approved up to £1.65m of Community Infrastructure Levy funding toward redevelopment, and agreed in principle to surrender the club's two existing leases — a stadium lease dated 13 June 2019 running to 2049, and a training-pitch lease from 2004 expiring in 2029 on upward-only RPI-linked compounding reviews — and replace them with a single 50-year agreement. Capacity would rise from 4,061 to 5,863. Approval in principle is not a completed lease, the financial terms are still being negotiated and must return to the council, and the proposed rent is confidential. We covered that decision in September.

The proportions are what matter here. A little under a third of the ground was occupied for Boston United, which means selling substantially more tickets is not realistically available to this club. Alongside naming rights, council funding, a prospective fifty-year tenure and a seven-figure player sale, the gate is one line among several rather than the line everything depends on.

The match

Boston United led from the 26th minute, Tom Cursons beating several defenders on the run before finishing. Boreham Wood made the better chances and could not beat Louis Chadwick in the Boston goal, who denied Matt Rush before the break and again after it. Rush eventually got through on 85 minutes, finishing from a tight angle after a pass from Zak Brunt, and won it late on from a Regan Booty free-kick. He took the man of the match award, and the win took Wood to thirteen points from five.

Why it matters

The Burger Index exists because a price list is a financial document that clubs publish without thinking of it as one. The most revealing line on Boreham Wood's is not the burger. It is the £3.00 that attaches to every ticket bought on the day.

Because it is a flat sum rather than a percentage, it takes 15% more from the adult and 50% more from the nine-year-old beside them, at a club that has publicly frozen its prices and framed that freeze around affordability. The freeze is real and the advance prices are reasonable for the level. But a concession structure exists to charge less to those least able to pay, and a uniform surcharge laid across the top of it erodes precisely that, quietly, in a line nobody announces. A percentage would not.