I'd avoided mentioing it until now, but yesterday I had quite some debate on Twitter regarding the cost of season tickets, not that anyone agreed with me, but here was my point, but firstly I'd like to say to avoid confusion, I'm NOT saying how much tickets should be, but more stressing why I think the available options need rethinking.
As a child I went to the Gills for what can only be described as pennies, even coming from a poor large family, I can never remember my visits to the Gills being discussed in the respect of price. So I assume the game back then was available to ALL.
So now let's move forward many decades, let's not kid ourselves, the Town of Gillingham is not exactly flooded with money, I'd go as far to say, that fans come from further afield and travel in on the train or by car etc. I'd say a large swathe of LOCAL have never attended a game, we need to be asking ourselves why.
Gillingham as a Town will be experiencing the same problems as everyone else, the cost of living, uncertainty over fuel bills, the cost of food rising etc. Thus the increased use of foodbanks. When you look at the demographics of Gillingham, would it be fair to say income is probably well below the average. I'm trying to be polite.
We are a Gillingham Football Club, surely pricing has to reflect a lot of the above, I'm not holding OUR club responsible for struggles of the local area or the actions of the Tory government...BUT and this is a very BIG BUT....I thought we were supposed to be a community club!?
What happened to those days of caring about community, what happened to those days when I was a kid and could afford to go.
People will argue, but IF we want promotion, it costs to build a team, but hang on, prices have been frozen for the coming season, well we had an absolutely donkey team last season, I'm trying to avoid swearing here....so what are we going to buy better with our pennies that we couldn't the season just gone.
We have the BMS stand, it will be virtually EMPTY the whole season, with the exception of maybe a couple of games. Open it up, sell ST's for it, at a massive discounted rate, under the condition you will have to relocate, for those few exceptional games.
Not viable I hear you say, well make it viable, I thought you were supposed to be a businessman, talk about vetting any potential future buyers, you need to be vetting yourself, what business trades at only 1/3rd of it's potential.
Every seat empty is lost money, and that happens for 2/3rds of games, it's time to change this mentality, afterall every sold seat has it's add-ons of other sales.
This isn't rocket science, change the mentality and think, empty seat lost revenue for the club. Places like Wrexham in the National League are getting gates of 10,000, do we need to look at their pricing structure, but they are not alone, I've seen larger gates than at our gaff, at Notts County, Grimsby, shall I go on.
I thought the Chairman was supposed to be a businessman, well time to get your thinking cap on Mr Chairman, said with the greatest of respect. £13 a game is great, IF you can afford the initial outlay, but a lot of people can't and there is going be more who cannot going forward.
What about finance on some sort of pay as you go system, with an initial much smaller outlay, I've got ideas, but I'm not paid to do this thinking.
Think of the future, rather than the now, we need to be building a future supporter base, otherwise it will continue to do what it is doing now, dying on its feet.
