Never mind bubbles, West Ham executives were blowing their own trumpets on Wednesday in a PR blitz to announce cut-price season-ticket prices in their new stadium.

Hours after the Guardian highlighted concerns that their deal to move into the £619m Olympic Stadium may result in a renewed flurry of complaints to the European Commission over state aid, West Ham revealed lower prices for their first season in their new home.

The vice-chair Karren Brady, who fought tooth and nail to secure the stadium for West Ham on advantageous terms and is convinced it will be a game-changer for the club’s fortunes, was all over the morning airwaves wringing maximum PR benefit from the announcement.

But she was very careful to say the attractive prices, which include a £289 season ticket and a £99 price point for all under-16s, were being funded by the Premier League’s bumper broadcast deal from 2016-17 rather than the fact West Ham will be paying only £15m up front, plus £2.5m per year in rent on a 99-year lease, to move into a state-of-the-art stadium.

The move will allow them to increase hospitality revenue at the top end and fund price cuts at the bottom. Arsenal and Chelsea, the destinations of choice in London for that breed of boxholder for whom prawn sandwiches have long since become passé, will be eyeing the new competitive landscape with interest.

As West Ham’s moving-in date looms, and the computer-generated images of a venue that looks every inch West Ham’s home rather than a multi-use stadium in which they are “licensee” for 25 days a year proliferate, it becomes ever clearer just what a good deal Brady has wrung out of the London Legacy Development Corporation.

The LLDC is not even particularly to blame. As chronicled, its hands were tied by a string of botched decisions and a willingness to store up trouble until after the Games by putting off difficult decisions about the stadium’s future.

It is a deal that will allow West Ham to offer vastly improved hospitality – minutes from Canary Wharf and the City in a location that nestles against the leisure and shopping options of Westfield – and more expensive seats at the top end (to sit in one of the VIP 1966 seats will cost £1,100 per season).

At the same time the hope is existing season-ticket holders will upgrade to a higher band at much the same price as their existing Upton Park seat, thus creating room for new fans, or those who find tickets hard to afford, to take up the cut-price offer in the £289 band.

The option to bring children for £99 per season and offer 16-to-21-year-olds (long neglected by most clubs) discounts of around 50% will, West Ham hope, nurture a new generation of fans.

All this enabled Brady to proclaim West Ham would have the cheapest season tickets in the Premier League – assuming they stay up next season and begin their new era in the top flight. David Sullivan and David Gold will position the move as purely altruistic but as part of the wider business plan it could also vastly increase the value of their club.

Existing season-ticket holders will be invited to the glossy “reservation centre” at Westfield to view a virtual tour of the stadium and a 3D recreation of how their new view will look.

In all, it is understood West Ham are hoping for 40,000 season-ticket holders in their 54,000-capacity stadium with its retractable seats and expensive, taxpayer-funded cantilevered roof.

That would, at a stroke, remove much of the risk from the move and give them a good chance of selling out most home games. Brady, long rumoured to have received a handsome bonus for engineering the move, has played a blinder in business terms. Only the unresolved state aid issue may yet come back to bite her.

Whether taxpayers and other clubs consider that to be fair is another matter and there is an eight-year window in which they may make their displeasure known to the European Commission.

The £15m West Ham are contributing to total conversion costs of over £190m will be more than met by the proceeds of selling Upton Park to developer Gaillard, which is building 700 homes on the site (and that plan has been criticised for its lack of social housing).

That may simply be good business sense on West Ham’s part but will increase the volume of complaints from rival clubs that West Ham are using their advantageous deal to move into a taxpayer-funded stadium and undercut their local rivals.

That fear that was at the heart of the former Leyton Orient owner Barry Hearn’s persistent and trenchant criticism of the Olympic Stadium deal and has been picked up on by a more recent complaint from the Charlton Athletic Supporters’ Trust.

Given the excellent transport links and cut-price tickets, they fear potential Charlton fans will be drawn from the other side of the river.

Having repeatedly called for cheaper prices and raised concerns that, despite their full stands, clubs risk pricing out a whole generation of fans it is unsurprising West Ham’s move has been backed by fans’ groups.

The Football Supporters’ Federation chairman, Malcolm Clarke, was effusive, hoping that it would encourage other clubs. “We hope other clubs follow suit and reduce ticket prices across the board, as West Ham United have done,” he said. “West Ham United have thrown down the gauntlet to other clubs – who can offer the cheapest season ticket prices in the top flight?”

Following the announcement of the Premier League’s £5.14bn domestic broadcast deal – likely to swell to more than £8bn once overseas sales are taken into account – there is unprecedented pressure on clubs to think seriously about their pricing structures in order to grow their fanbases in the long term. Some already do but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule.

Ticket price inflation runs at more than 700% at many clubs since the Premier League era began as a football ticket slowly but surely became a luxury item.

West Ham cannot be blamed for making the most of their situation and deserve some credit for using their “game-changing” slice of good fortune to think long term about how to grow their revenues and their fanbase.

But the perception they are doing so on the back of being gifted an asset funded largely from the public purse will be one that continues to dog them long after they play their first match in the stadium in August 2016.