Having to contact 20,000 people every year is a ridiculously inefficient way of doing things, it's utterly pointless, just sign them up once and make sure they don't leave, it's not complicated. Just make the pricing reasonable and fair and don't set set too many restrictions on where people have to sit and it's a far better system.
Missing a footnote saying "You'll be happy to know that the next generation of fan will be paying the same price as the recently departed generation - full price."
"Gates will open at noon. Please make sure you arrive early as we will be ID checking everyone and checking their tickets/passes."
They already contact them every week to tell them there's a game on, but it doesn't involve anyone actually having to do anything, it's just information.
You mean they didn't consult our owners on how to price things? Surely if you get relegated the thing to do is increase prices by 35%. They are never going to build up a large fan base at Sunderland with these sort of things.
I didn't fully understand it, so did my best. The views expressed in my posts are not necessarily mine.
That's by the by. They'd have to formally contact their members to inform them of any price changes & administer any cancellations in much the same way as they would when informing season ticket holders the next season's prices & sorting renewals.
Up until the new gates came in I doubt that many of the turnstile operators bothered to look at the passholder. Was the concession age lower in 2002? The issue was not the main driver behind the change, I understand that. By using direct debits, it does make it harder for people to cheat, I suppose.
There'll be some administration whatever system is used, but not having to do anything with the vast majority of memberships, is obviously far better than the certainty that you've got administer absolutely all of them. I can't believe people actively want the ballache of renewing their pass every year, it's something that Premier Club members never had to bother with and I always thought it was a far better system.
More than 91 other clubs manage it OK, many with far more than 20k supporters. If we're relegated they may have less than 10k to sort. We could end up with nearer 5k members by Christmas if we start next season in the Championship as we did this one in the PL.
Potentially, though if we're relegated, I'm pretty sure the concessions will return. They may do anyway, it's obviously not gone the way they wanted and they need to sort the West Upper anyway.
Derby, similar sized club, similar sized city, sold 27,000 of those old-fashioned season passes for the Championship in the time we announced sales of our new, future of football pricing and the way forward membership scheme was approaching 10,000 tor the PL. Won't these backward clubs ever grasp the future?
They don't really need to contact anyone though As I said they could contact anyone on a direct debit once to make them into a rolling contract (I assume that's a reasonable % of the season passes anyway) and then tell everyone else (via public announcement) how to pay if they want to renew and just let them get on with it People don't need reminding that there's another season starting later in the year
Will anyone trust them not to reinstate the membership scheme if we went back up? And, more importantly, will Ehab set a precedent and admit they got something wrong?
If they switched to a membership scheme, with the prices unchanged, they'd have sold exactly the same amount of passes, it would just have saved them several hundred grand in administration costs. In fact, they have multiple year passes, that you can pay for in twelve installments per year, so they're basically doing it already.
I wasn't suggesting that they'd scrap the membership scheme, merely that they might reintroduce concessions. They've made it very difficult now, as the adult passes are too cheap and the child passes are too expensive, so they can't change them without upsetting someone.
We aren't the only ones with problems with pricing structures. Talking to a Wednesday fan who was saying their season tickets were decent value.but on the day prices were ridiculous. It cost him more £18 more for a Category A Championship game for a ticket on their Kop End than it would have done to get a ticket in the North Stand to watch us play Liverpool. Even a Zone 4 ticket at the KC was £9 cheaper. They sold a far few season tickets but it explains why although their crowds aren't bad they didn't go up as much as they would have done previously when they went on a good run.
