Mel Barrett has given up his seat at Carrow Road after the price of his hospitality season ticket jumped by 62pc, from £2,122 to £3,435. The 76-year-old pensioner from Thetford said he could no longer afford to keep the place he had held for six years in the Sir Arthur South lounge.

That rise matters now because Barrett says the change has ended a routine that had become part of his life on Norwich matchdays. He said the staff all call him Mel and know him well, and that he had kept going by sacrificing holidays and other luxuries to pay for the ticket.

Barrett has been going to the stadium for decades, but he said the lounge became the place where he settled after years of moving around the ground. After his wife died 10 years ago, he said the people there helped fill a gap in his life and turned matchdays into something more than football. “I lost my wife 10 years ago and I made friends up there,” he said.

He said the club’s shift felt personal, not just financial. Barrett said Norwich “used to be a family club,” and that he had once taken his children there before finding his own corner of the ground. Now, he said, “it felt like they did not want me, they wanted my money, that’s it.”

The increase has left him with no regular seat in the viewing gallery and no clear answer on what, if anything, the club will do next. Barrett said: “They are a championship club, they should not be charging that.” For a supporter who built his matchday life around Carrow Road, the bill was high enough to end it.