| Tuesday Nights Attendance 14:39 - Nov 30 with 4737 views | DWQPR |
Let’s be honest, given that we hadn’t won at home for 13 matches, scoring very few goals, it was a very cold Tuesday night, the game could be viewed on the red button, to have yet another near sell out was fantastic............except, let’s be really honest here, there was certainly at least 6,000 empty seats, and given that Clive’s match report suggested that there were 1,100 Stoke fans in attendance in an away end holding 2,800, although I noticed that the lower tier was sparsely populated with home supporters, the maths just do not add up, nor the vast empty rows of seats in the SAR upper. I cannot think for the life of me that season tickets en masses decided to stay at home. So what’s the reason? Increase revenue to help placate FFP fears or to show any potential future owner that this is a well supported club whatever the weather or state of the team? |  |
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| Tuesday Nights Attendance on 18:33 - Dec 1 with 383 views | SimonD |
| Tuesday Nights Attendance on 16:56 - Nov 30 by stevec |
Even if it’s counting ST holders who didn’t attend, I’m surprised we’ve got so many with season tickets this season.
From vague memory, the club wouldn’t issue more than nine, maybe ten thousand season tickets each season to allow those in who want to attend on a game by game basis.
We rarely got more than 2-3000 pay at the gate home end attendees, which suggests the club would need to have sold over 13000 season tickets this year to get anywhere near the 16900 quoted.
Pondering this, it occurred to me that if you’re in an FFP crisis, it would make sense for the owners to ‘buy up’ empty seats, or at least those unaccounted for, which would create FFP room legitimately rather than just stumping up £2 million a month to cover the losses but has zero impact on the FFP situation.
If the owners are not doing this, then may I make a suggestion. A bit like flights and trains, increase the price of tickets say, from an hour or two before kick off. Fans don’t buy tickets that late in the day any more, so we’d be unaffected. But let’s say they set the late price at £100, for every 1000 tickets below capacity that would raise £100,000 per game or £2.3 million over the season. Let’s say we average 15000 a game, if the owners buy up the shortfall on capacity of 18000, that raises the clubs income by just short of £7 million, or over 3 years of FFP a significant wriggle room of £21 million.
They could reduce the £24 million they’ve been putting in to cover the losses by that £7 million so they wouldn’t be any worse off either. |
Sadly it doesn't work out quite that way.
Included in the face price of a ticket is VAT, an EFL levy and a "handling fee" for whoever runs our ticketing (Ticketmaster?).
Would the owners be ok with approximately 25% of their money going to HMRC, the EFL and Ticketmaster? Probably not. | | | |
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