Burger Index: Fisher

The index entry

The burger

There is something reassuring about arriving at a tier nine ground and finding BURGER — £3.50 written on a board outside the food wagon.

Alfie's Food Wagon handles the catering at St Paul's, and the burger arrives without any attempt to turn half-time into a dining concept. A substantial patty, properly browned, with a generous helping of cooked onions in a soft, lightly glazed bun. It looked uncomplicated because it was uncomplicated, but there was nothing cheap about the part that matters: a good crust, plenty of flavour and enough weight to make £3.50 look increasingly improbable in London.

Ours came without cheese, as the Index rule requires. It is the same construction as Ascot's, £2.20 less, and rather better.

8.3/10. That puts Fisher behind only Kingstonian's 9.2, ahead of Ascot's 8.1 and Hanwell's 7.8, and ahead of the 8.2 we gave the venison burger at Tottenham — which cost £9.95.

The price list, read as a financial document

Fisher's board is the most interesting we have photographed, and the reason is one line in the middle of it.

The basics first. Plain burger £3.50, cheese 50p, double £4.50. Chicken burger £3.50, double chicken £4.50, cheese 50p on either. Hot dog £3, jumbo sausage dog £3, and a wild boar and pork gourmet hot dog called The AJ at £5. Chips £2.50, sides £3 for four of anything — mozzarella sticks, chilli cheese nuggets, onion rings, hash browns, mac and cheese bites, jalapeño bites. Kids' meals £4. A veggie box at £10 for any four sides.

Two things stand out before the main event. Cheese is 50p, exactly as at Ascot and Hampton, which is now consistent enough across the Index to look like a national convention. And the second patty costs £1.00, against £2.50 at both Ascot and Hampton — at Fisher, a double burger costs less than a single at most grounds we have visited.

Then there is The Sharpie: any three burgers of your choice, plus three onion rings, for £6.00. Seven pounds with cheese.

Three plain burgers bought separately cost £10.50, so the deal saves £4.50 before the onion rings are counted. With cheese, three burgers at £4.00 each come to £12.00 against £7.00, a saving of £5.00. For comparison, Ascot's best combination saved 45p and Hampton's saved a pound. This is a different order of magnitude, and it is not a rounding decision — somebody has priced a basket at roughly 43% below the sum of its parts in order to move three burgers instead of one. The veggie box does the same thing more modestly, four sides at £3 each for £10.

£15 for the evening

Admission, a burger and a lager came to £15.00 at Fisher, which is the cheapest total the Index has recorded and it is not close. Ascot was £22, Hanwell £23, Hampton £26, and Tottenham £41.90. Put another way, the entire evening at Fisher cost less than the £25 ticket at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, before anyone had bought anything to eat.

The gap runs across all three components. Admission is £8 against Tottenham's cup-priced £25 and Hampton's £15, with concessions at £5 and accompanied under-16s admitted free. The burger is £3.50 against £9.95. The lager is £3.50 against £6.95.

None of which is surprising in itself, given Fisher are eight tiers below Tottenham. What is worth noting is that the burger scored higher.

A Bermondsey brewery at a Rotherhithe club

The bar board in the Fisherman's Rest is the other thing worth recording. Fisher sell Anspach & Hobday's Bermondsey Pale, their Ansbacher lager and their London Black stout, alongside Lost & Grounded's Wanna Go To The Sun pale ale and a Helles lager, plus Against The Grain cider.

Anspach & Hobday are a south London brewery, a short distance from Fisher's part of Rotherhithe. Lost & Grounded are from Bristol. Neither is a mass-market football-ground default, and stocking them at tier nine gives Fisher's bar a rather different offer from the standard lager selection.

The Index rule is the premium lager, and at Fisher that is Anspach & Hobday's Ansbacher: £3.50 for a large can rather than a draught pour. It is the joint-cheapest drink the Index has bought while being among the least ordinary. For a club whose entire matchday proposition costs £15, choosing independent beer over the cheapest available option says something about who Fisher think their supporters are.

The club behind the prices

The pricing is not accidental, and neither is the ownership.

Fisher are supporter-owned, run by Fisher FC Society Limited, a registered society in which members elect the board. The present club emerged after Fisher Athletic was wound up in 2009 over unpaid debts, with supporters subsequently establishing the structure that operates today.

The club describes its ticket pricing explicitly as an attempt to provide an affordable alternative to Premier League and Championship football in London — which is a statement of purpose rather than a marketing line, and it is visible in every number on both boards.

There is a larger financial story here about what a tier nine club actually earns and how much difference modest amounts of matchday income make at that level. That deserves its own piece, and it will get one.

Why it matters

Fisher serve the second-best burger in the Index at the lowest price.

That is worth stating plainly, because the assumption running through most discussion of football food is that price tracks quality and that the further down you go the worse it gets. The Index now has evidence in both directions. Tottenham's venison Game Burger was very good and cost £9.95. Fisher's plain burger was better and cost £3.50. The gap in the score is 0.1. The gap in the price is £6.45.

What the board actually shows is a club pricing to fill a counter rather than to maximise margin per transaction. A three-burger deal at 43% off the individual prices is not a way of extracting more from each customer; it is a way of getting more food out of the hatch on a Tuesday night with 238 people in the ground.

At £15 for admission, a burger and a drink, Fisher have priced an evening's football at roughly what a single item costs at the top of the pyramid. The football finished 6-3, with Festos Kamara taking a hat-trick and Fisher four points clear at the top of the division.

Next week: wherever we end up. Same burger, same questions, and a 9.2 still to beat.