With regards to season tickets I can tell you that of the 300+ we have sold about 100 of them do not actually come to home games. So in effect, with the average cost of it being £7 (£170/23 league games approx£7), the season tickets actually make us £700 from peopel not there. Obviously the 200 who turn up are paying £1,400 less than they would so in effect....gate receipts are only down by £700. And the bosst from income during the summer is immeasurable, altho figuratively it's about £50,000.
Also, bear in mind that this looks good on balance sheets and re-assures the bank manager.
I found that one of the most bizarre things I'd ever heard when I was told but then consider it is people like Ecky, may miss 2/3 home games a season but it's still worth his while financially to purchase one, I know Jimmy Hill has one despite being a student in Oxford, his brother uses it when he isn't here but again, not every game. Still worthwhile though.
The putting up prices debate was done a lot at the start of the season and I think we've probably reached our limit for this level of football, particularly as one of the more 'price elastic' clubs in the league - i.e. putting our prices up would put off more people. Unfortunately this works slightly differently if you put prices down, we wouldn't necessarily get more through the gate!
You have to charge the same amount for away fans as you do home. Some clubs charge away fans more by only making seating available to them but even then it's just paying what the home fans pay for seating. As we are one of the few clubs who make away fans go on an open terrace we can't really do that. Sometimes we let them under the stand if it's raining or a la Stevenage put htem in the family stand. I suppose you could argue to charge them more then but it's slightly churlish and we keep a bit of dignity by not doing so.
The Full Time thing is a really interesting one, I personally, couldn't see it happening but it's only right that we should at least sonsider the possibilities. I think what should have happened is that the wideboys living beyond their means should have cut down. It looked for example as if Gravesend, Weymouth, Crawley, Grays, Northwich and others would go part time and there would be 10-12 clubs in this league who were aprt time. It would then be feasible to be part time and compete. That hasn't happened though and the problem is that the clubs who come up are either like this season battling for 5th bottom or will more likely next season be full time clubs.
If Kettering and Telford come up from Conference North (and the 2 from the south are similar/full time) in place of, well 4 of the current bottom 5 then you will have a league with 20 south/southern midlans sides who are full time. Competing in this league part time when there are 7 or others is feasible, if there's only 2 of you then it just isn't and needs to be looked at.
Full time is a huge leap though, like exGk says, Training facilities being the most obvious. There would also be a shift in the way things are done. This club runs on unpaid volunteers, everyone does something for nothing really and you can't just pay someone to do something without keeping the volunteers on. I'm not saying that the volunteers would suddenly wnat paying but it's a hard shift to make. I'm not really explaining it very well but it's not as easy as saying 'oh get paid people in', it might work at Oxford where you need a arge amount of staff.
Anyway.
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Reality check!!
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Topic: Reality check!! (Read 11596 times)