our crowd on saturday was the lowest i can remember for ages.despite the team doing well our home crowds are dwindling down to a pitifull level and we have just got promoted.one main reason for this are the prices are too high, we are in a reccession ffs,but the club are not doing anything to make fans want to come to adams park.casual supporters are put off by our stupid system of going through a series of unneeded questions just to buy a ticket,long gone are the days when you could turn up and pay your money at the gate and watch the game with no hassle.all this crap about platinum ,gold ,silver and bronze season tickets are not needed.the shutting down of the frank adams upper for the forthcoming cup game with notts forest is another example of how badly run our club is.tickets could have been sold cheap to get as many fans in the ground as possible but instead the club do the complete opposite and do nothing to attract casual supporters let alone the regular ones.i think its about time steve hayes realised that the club are alienating the blues fans from the club and something needs to be done about it.there are plenty of fans that used to be regular season ticket holders that now dont even go to adams park yet they go to away games,a sad reflection on whats happening to our beloved club
I agree totally - tomorrows game should be about creating an atmosphere and getting people into the stadium. The prices are shocking Some team did a really good offer to get loads of season tickets holders - why couldn't we do something like that. I appreciate they have to have competitive pricing but surely for the good of the team having more fans supporting the club is much better.
i think the club you are on about is hartlepool low prices and lots of new season ticket holders.bradford do it cheap as well and get gates around the 10,000 mark so it proves it can work.
Surely it makes economic sense to have 6000 season ticket holders at say £120 a year rather than 2500 season ticket holders at £200. The whole scheme would attract many to the club that are not regulars, convert some of those for life as well as giving the team a boost having such a positive support. Obviously I am wrong and we should continue the way we are i.e. expensive and losing a couple of million quid a year
It might have already been said but more clarity is desperately needed. The method to buy tickets is stupidly complicated and requires a lot of waiting around. How about tickets on the gate like we used to have, instead of the stupid wait for half an hour outside the ticket office which only annoys and puts off potential supporters. Combine this and cheaper tickets and gates would go up again.
It would be very interesting to see how many would turn up if it was totally free for one match. That would be one way of assessing the absolute maximum attendance achievable. I don't know what % of these would need to return as paying customers to recover the loss on the one game. Depends how many non season ticket holders usually turn up each week. (If, say, only 5,000 turned up for a free game, that would be very informative but I'm not sure where that would leave us). The reduced season ticket suggestion above could be floated as a special offer to those who took up the free one match invite. At the end of the day it's about getting in enough revenue to cover all the costs and help to reduce the debt. If the admission prices were reduced and the attendance didn't increase that would be a problem. The only way to find out how many we can get through those gates is to experiment. And as for the ticket situation, and the problems it has caused, that is so antiquated I couldn't believe it. Email bookings and confirmations are essential to resolve the problems suffered by fans recently.
Football is far too expensive now and it's because of the greed of the big clubs making smaller clubs like us need to charge more. David Conn wrote an excellent piece on this in the Guardian last week about how the boom in football since the Premier League and Sky came along is pricing the real fans out of following their clubs: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/dav.../aug/16/premier-league-football-ticket-prices For anyone that hasn't read it, Conn also wrote a book a few years ago called the Beautiful Game. I only read it recently and it's a fascinating read, but also very depressing at times. Unfortunately it also only confirms our fears about one man having sole control of a club. I do agree though that we need more initiatives like Hartlepool and Bradford have done. If the club still want this big new stadium then surely doing these kind of deals will benefit them long term as it'll get more fans coming to matches on a regular basis.
I harp on about this very issue quite a lot so ill try to keep it short. If you take £15 as an average ticket price for entry to AP (taking into account students, kids etc) - 3500 fans @ £15 = £52,500 in gate reciepts. If you charged £7 for every leage cup ticket, you would need just over 7000 fans to make the same money and with the extra food and programmes being sold probably more. With decent advertising in the BFP and other local media outlets, IMO WWFC could make this number easily. Rocky is right, the average, casual fan is being put off from going to the football. You can blame the recession but cheaper forms of entertainment still attract decent crowds. Its not always because people cant afford to come but rather dont want to come because it is a rip off plain and simple. With the Olympics, Rugby World Cup, England being #1 in test cricket etc, there are plenty of other sports on the British public's radar that people will be attracted to. There is only so far fans 'die hard' approach can and will go.
Free admission and less than 8,000 home fans turn up. Sounds like we need a bigger stadium. Of course, it's not just the admission fee is it. It's the total cost of the day (bus/taxi fares, car park, drinks etc). I think the car parking is £5; you can go and watch the richest horse race in Europe (and second richest in the world) and the car parking will set you back 2 euros.
There should be a number of standard deals, kids say under 12 free for all games as long as they are accompanied by an adult. We have students at uni in Wycombe, why not offer them two for one every so often. How about if a season ticket holder brings along a guest say 5 times and they get a discount on next year's season ticket? Surely some of the many off the field staff our club has can come up with similar ideas! I would say 2 for 1 at the bars but I don't think they would be too keen promoting too much drink before a footie match! The one thing they have to be careful of is doing deals that are to the detriment of season ticket holders. A free game for everyone does effectively stitch up season ticket holders as they have already paid for one. I do think the new platinum, gold and silver cards are actually a good idea but alone they will not get the attendances up!
if the forest game was a couple of quid for youngsters and say 7 quid for adults the crowd would be good
finchey the deals detriment to season ticket holders wouldnt bother me in the least to be honest i just want to see adams park buzzing with bigger crowds,but it may upset other season ticket holders.one of the things that annoys me is why should i have to pay extra to see a cup game at home it should be included in the season ticket and if they cant do that at least give it to us a lot cheaper.
Do the season tickets exclude certain matches? If so then one of those matches could be used for the special promotions.
i wonder if the club put up a poll on here ,the gas room and the bucks free about selling season tickets for next season at 150 quid how many would say yes they would buy one.
May be a strange thing to say but if we had lost to Colchester we wouldn't be having this game against Forest and WWFC would have got no revenue at all from a non existent match. I don't know how much it costs to put on a match (stewards, etc,etc) but if they could attract 8,000 crowd to the Forest game, how much would they have to charge just to cover the costs?
