Why? We barely sold out a game last season and it was one of the most successful seasons we've had. Even now we're struggling to sell out season passes. Unless the extra capacity was to allow 5,000 freebies a game then it's pointless.
Think Premier League. Also think that you can reduce prices and get bigger attendances and get more merchandising and catering sales. You can't take a very simplistic approach to attendances.
Even in the Premier League there's only a small number of fixtures that would require an extension if the last top flight season was anything to go by. The whole cheaper ticket thing is misleading as well. If you were to reduce say an average ticket price of £25 down to £22 for the current capacity of 24,500 you'd need to sell nearly 3,500 extra tickets just to maintain the previous revenue. That's not accounting for increased running costs and the massive investment that comes with building an extension. There would be a small increase in catering revenue but this would be relatively minor. Is a £3 saving even enough to encourage those that currently can't afford it? Ideally we'd have 40,000 people paying £20 each, but it just won't happen.
Baffling that we've not sold out yet - that said how many will want to go on Boxing Day for example? - can sell out getting on twice over I reckon. Should we manage to stay in the PL for a sustained period then en extension is a must - 20k season ticket holders with 10% sell to gen public and 2500 to away fans is not big enough - should Swansea and Cardiff see the need to extend(when the former often get less thn 20k) then we certainly need to.
As I said you can't simplify it like that. the extra fans will also spend money on merchandising and catering. You would want a band of prices: more hospitality, increase some prices and reduce others, give some tickets away to school children with an eye to the future.
We've already got the cheapest tickets in the league, we shouldn't need to reduce them further, stay up a couple of seasons and we'll sell out no problem.
I know them all, all alright lads but under resourced, underpaid and overworked. Ash has done a decent job this season in difficult circumstances but he fell into the role after his old job was made redundant and he had ZERO relevant experience whatsoever. This beggars belief when other EPL clubs pay theirs Comms people 6 figure salaries and I can cast iron guarantee there isnt a single other club in the top 2 divisions and possibly the whole league who would appoint their lead media guy in that manner. It shows PRECISELY the level of importance City give to this integral role. Edit - and you missed George who heads up the whole Marketing / Comms function. Unless he's left since last season?
Id have thought it the other way around, attendances will drop once the novelty wears off and people get complacent.
Some will become complacent, but a successful team fills a stadium more easily than any other initiative.
Our prices are not set taking into account other clubs prices because nobody would say "Hull are £3 cheaper so I won't go to Sunderland this week I'll travel to Hull" I agree that our prices are cheap but I am thinking about a bigger stadium. If we expand then the seats with a worse view could be cheaper. It would also depend on whether people who pay £25 would change to worse seats for £22. Most clubs have bands of prices depending on the opposition including City. Real Madrid used to charge about 10 times for the Barcelona match to what they charged for a relegation favourite. City charge from £20 to £30 for adults which seems sensible now but we must still lose a lot for the better teams and lose out on encouraging children to watch the matches even if we wanted to let them in for free.
At the moment, we can't even sell out our season tickets at mid table Championship prices, until we do, there'll be no ground expansion. I believe there's an option of adding over 1,000 seats without building any new stands, but the council won't pay for it and until we're turning people away, neither will Assem. A better short term fix would be sticking the away fans in the north east corner and installing safe standing in the North Stand, but again, the council won't pay for it. The SMC could pay for it, but FC don't want more seats installing, so won't contribute anything towards it. I think it's safe to assume that our capacity will remain unchanged for the foreseeable future.
How do you come to that conclusion? Every game in both Premier League seasons was sold out. The only time we failed to reach capacity was when the away fans didn't sell their complete allocation.
I really dont think that's true. I'm sure there were plenty of home tickets available for numerous games in season 2.
Our average attendance in the second season was 24,390, considering a few clubs barely brought anyone, we can't have been far off sold out for most games.
Well yes I agree, but that's not 'sold out'. I remember a lot of spare seats anyway, unless people were buying and not turning up.
And we've already done this once. We re-jigged a load of seating in season 2 EPL and got a fair few extra hundred in hence us breaking our record attendance a few times. Havent we since broke it again, is it vs TWS now? Edit - I can still only find it as record attendance vs Liverpool but I was fairly sure we'd beaten this now. Could be wrong...
