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Post by tuck on Jan 9, 2007 1:00:04 GMT
I know there's already an FA Cup thread, but I wanted to bring up two things from this weekend's round of FA Cup matches.
I downloaded the BBC's Match of the Day coverage and watched highlights of a few games - namely Nottingham Forest vs Charlton and Sheffield United vs Swansea and a couple of others, and the first thing that struck me was all the empty seats.
Then I happened to be reading ESPN's Soccernet, as I frequently do, and I noticed a story that attendances at the FA Cup were their "highest in years."
So then I went back and watched the rest of Match of the Day and saw that St. Andrews was less than half full for the visit of Newcastle United (who brought down a sizeable contingent of Geordies themselves).
At the end of the match, the first comment Steve Bruce made was on the size of the crowd - and how ticket prices were squeezing out the average fan. I could only commend him for pointing out what I was seeing with my own eyes.
Then - on Match of the Day, whatever that twat of a host's name is (not Gary Lineker, obviously) says something like "yes, Steve Bruce disappointed with the size of the crowd at St. Andrews, but that's maybe a topic for another time."
I realise that match analysis is important on MOTD, but burying heads in the sand about attendances at matches in Britain seems to be a favourite trait over there.
Nick Hornby put it eerily well (considering he was writing in the pre-Premier League era) when he talked about how many people pay a lot of money to attend football games "for the atmosphere." He was pointing out that the more money people were willing to pay for that atmosphere, the more ticket prices would rise, and the first fans affected would generally be the ones that created that atmosphere.
I think what we've been seeing for years at Old Trafford and now Stamford Bridge, is the average fan has been priced out of the ground. I've seen empty seats at every Premiership ground lately, though (Middlesbrough look like they may as well play at Hartlepool).
One of the things I've found hardest to believe, is the ticket prices at non-Premier League clubs. I realise that some of these clubs have fallen on hard times and probably rely on a percentage of gate revenue to pay player wages. But I doubt I could afford to watch teams like Leicester City or Derby County or Nottingham Forest week in, week out. (II'd look up ticket prices now, but then I need to create an account just to look at a club's website).
Anyway, this isn't a criticism of British football per se. I'm interested in what you guys think about ticket prices over there, though.
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Post by dragoncat on Jan 9, 2007 2:25:49 GMT
On FIFA 07 my stadium sells out every game. I even have ticket prices maxed out. I hereby nominate myself to be FA chairman to use my FIFA 07 skills to deal with this problem.
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Post by mikeyuk on Jan 9, 2007 5:14:40 GMT
I went to see Southapton play at Blackburn a few years back. The only reason I went was because one of my mates could get cheap tickets through his daughters school. If it wasn't for 2/3 of the ground having paid £1 for their seats, the place would have been pretty empty. As it was, the majority of the ground was taken up by dads and children. Apparently, Blackburn now struggle to give away this allocation of tickets.
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Post by floyd on Jan 9, 2007 7:16:48 GMT
I rarely get to games now not only because of ticket prices but because of the lack of availability. Sounds like I am going completely against what Tuck said but hear me out. In times gone by, people used to support their local team, no matter how shit they were, because it was simply too hard to get to other places regularly and all your mates went to your local. Now, in the times of the metrosexual man, where image is everything, no-one wants to be seen Supporting Newport County, they want a team they can support from the pub or use to impress the boss by taking him to a power lunch in the stands. It becomes an expensive road trip. Money talks so the same class of people that used to go to watch the likes of Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs, Man U and Liverpool can't afford to go with their kids anymore. Instead their places are taken by people from footballing non-entities like Coventry, huge parts of Ireland, Leicester (sorry mikey), Norwich and the south coast. Its funny because it really shows if you listen to the crowds at big weekend games, huge numbers are 'outsiders' but cut to the early cup stage games in the middle of the week where the ticket prices change and there are more scousers, lots of whom now take their kids to the reserve and youth matches instead. Smaller clubs like Sheffield United and Notts Forest (or are they a sleeping giant) lose out to successful clubs in terms of attracting new support so they charge more to try and balance the books while the local fans of the bigger clubs get outed by money.
The loss of terraces did alot to change ticket prices, after all, the terrace was the domain of the common man, cheap to get in, smelly and somewhere no-one in their right mind would take someone to impress them!
Timeless will know alot more about the state of Liverpool these days as he is a regular but I am just writing as I saw it through the 90's when I was a regular (when Liverpool were shit ha ha )
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Post by mikeyuk on Jan 9, 2007 10:10:51 GMT
Money talks so the same class of people that used to go to watch the likes of Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs, Man U and Liverpool can't afford to go with their kids anymore. Instead their places are taken by people from footballing non-entities like Coventry, huge parts of Ireland, Leicester (sorry mikey), Norwich and the south coast. quote] No offence taken! I wouldn't dream of going to Leicester footy. £22 cheapest ticket! Pffff!
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Post by kajet on Jan 9, 2007 11:38:32 GMT
We paid 30 quid each for the cheapest tickets to Crystal Palace vs. QPR. And it was a crap game. Many empty seats.
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Post by mikeyuk on Jan 9, 2007 12:48:56 GMT
And you were late for kick off. Fair play to you for going, though.
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Post by kajet on Jan 9, 2007 14:19:23 GMT
If you want to be cool, you gotta do stuff like that.
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Post by mikeyuk on Jan 9, 2007 15:20:11 GMT
Aah, so that's what I'm missing.
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Post by floyd on Jan 9, 2007 19:32:57 GMT
The worst match I ever saw was Liverpool v Crystal Palace one Feb 11th (it was my birthday and the shittest present ever!) Sitting in the back row of the Centenary Stand with the wind whistling up my arsehole for 90 minutes. The one and only time I ever ventured outside of the Kop
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Post by mikeyuk on Jan 9, 2007 20:27:43 GMT
I've only been to Anfield once, for a rugb league world club final (Wigan v Penrith Panthers). The floodlights were better than the sun, but the seats didn't seem to cater for anyone that hadn't invented bouncing bombs.
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Post by timeless on Jan 10, 2007 15:55:30 GMT
Ticket prices are scandalous nowadays simple as that I pay £600/€900 for my season ticket in the kop the cheapest in the ground. When I got my season ticket 10-15 years ago the price you paid upfront worked out that you got 2 free games a season now it's nothing.
The club simply doesn't give a shit about the normal fan anymore typical example 2 weeks before xmas they put on sale tickets for the Arsenal Carling cup game £32/€47, Arsenal FA cup game £32/€47 and the Blackburn away game £36/€54 all in the space of three days it's just let's get the money in the bank and start making it some interest.
The game last night full whack for the ticket basically to watch a reserve game and get a fuckin good hiding. When I first had to start paying adult price for my seasonticket in 1992 it was about £250/€370 still in the exact same seat the view hasn't got any better to justify paying over double the price.
Two years ago going to Blackburn or Bolton you were paying around £20-£25 there this year I paid £36 and £38. Now these teams can't even fill there own grounds and have special discounts for there own fans and even certain away fans like when Blackburn played at Bolton they only paid £15 yet they knew Liverpool would take 7,000 there and charged full price. How they they can get away with charging one set of fans one price and another set different I don't know.
But in general I can't wait for the bubble to burst and as floyd said the businessmen and hangers on to fuck off the better I had a typical dickhead in front of me last night I don't even think the prick knew the rules of football and it sounded like he lived in the outback.
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Post by floyd on Jan 10, 2007 17:15:21 GMT
They are the ones that piss me off the most, spend half the game talking about work and their boss and how much they earn then the rest of it complaining that they couldn't get anything other than junk food in the stand. Bring back the days of rivers of piss running down the steps and being pelted with cold pie crusts. My Mum was saying the funniest thing she ever saw back then was a big fat cunt getting passed, with great effort, over everyones heads to the front. Thinking he had passed out or felt ill everyone felt dead sorry for him, until he ran to the girl selling food, bought 2 Mars bars then dived back in the crowd. Apparently he did it quite alot!
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Post by tuck on Jan 17, 2007 4:21:44 GMT
Just read this on oleole.com
Killing The Golden Goose Posted by twohundredpercent Mon, 15 Jan 07 · It's not often that something that happens on the terraces ever gets discussed on "Match Of The Day" these days, unless it's a fat Geordie without his replica shirt on. These days, fans are little more than consumers - paying extras who turn up, buy merchandise, occasionally sing, and leave five minutes before time in order to avoid the worst of the traffic. However, the eerily quiet atmosphere at The Reebok Stadium did provoke comment from Gary Lineker et al on Saturday evening. The reason for this lack of atmosphere was obvious - Manchester City supporters boycotted the match in protest at being asked to fork out £36 for tickets for their match against Bolton Wanderers.
Although their recent performances on the pitch have been encouraging, there has been an atmosphere of torpor surrounding The City Of Manchester Stadium this year. Crowds have frequently been 10,000 or more below capacity, and disquiet has been rising as the season has gone on. When City played Bolton at Eastlands in December, Bolton's travelling support were charged £27 for tickets, but for the return match, the ticket prices were hiked up again and City fans decided to make a stand against this cost. It was a timely reminder to the Premiership's clubs that they cannot take the regular attendance of people to their expensively constructed temples for granted and that, if they do so, they do so at their peril.
I commented earlier this season on the paltry number of Fulham supporters that made the long trip north to Blackburn at the start of December, and it's easy to see why they didn't bother with the trip. It takes a full day out of your week (at least three hours travel each way), and with tickets now starting to reach nosebleed-inducing levels, is it really worth the effort? The City fans that didn't bother travelling across Manchester didn't exactly miss much. The game itself was a dismal goal-less draw. At some point, something has to give.
Everybody has their own personal horror story to tell. Last season, the last time I went to a Premiership match, I went to see Spurs play West Ham United at White Hart Lane. Someone had dropped out from a group of people that I know, and I didn't have to pay for my ticket, in the giddying upper tier of the West Stand. The price that Spurs wanted for this seat a quarter of a mile up in the sky? A jaw-dropping £70. I made a resolution at that point to not bother with the upper end of English football any more. It's not necessarily that I can't afford it - more that I simply can't justify that sort of expenditure for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon any more.
This isn't merely a problem in the Premiership. With the TV money no longer filtering down through the divisions in the same way as it did in the 1970s and 1980s, clubs outside the Premiership have a stark decision to make if they want to have any chance of staying in touch with the bigger clubs. They can either dig themselves into massive mounds of debt, or they can ratchet up the prices and hope that the die-hards will continue to turn up. When Ken Bates pitched up at Leeds United, the first thing that he did was shove the cheapest ticket prices at Elland Road up to £25. This would be all very well if Leeds were playing well, but their finances are still the subject of considerable intrigue (as demonstrated by the change in ownership of Elland Road to a holding company in the British Virgin Islands - nothing suspicious going on there whatsoever), and their team is dreadful. Crowds there have plummeted to well under 20,000. The good people of Leeds won't waste their hard-earned cash on such dross.
In the rush to earn dollars today, the clubs are potentially storing up problems for themselves in the future. Go to any match, particularly in the Premiership, and you'll see that the crowd has aged. Those between sixteen and twenty-five, in particular, simply can't afford to go any more. When the forty and fifty-somethings that make up the lion's share of the crowds today aren't there any more, the game could have found that it has lost an entire generation of supporters. If you're, say, a nineteen year old earning, say £250 per week, can you seriously afford to splash out £50 every other week for a couple of hours' worth of football on a Saturday afternoon? It kind of strikes me that there are now three "classes" of football supporter: the upper class are the ones that can afford the season ticket, the Sky Sports subscription and the replica shirts. The middle class will go to a handful of matches per season, as a treat, and would like to go more but can't afford to. The lower class have simply been priced out of the market altogether. They can afford the replica shirt because that's a once a year investment of £40, but they are never going to be able to find the money for a Premiership match ticket. They're also considerably more likely to be younger than the other two groups - and if they fall out of the habit of the ritual of football, then the game is potentially heading for a massive fall in a few years or so.
Football supporters are all too often berated for being "disloyal" when they don't turn up, but the game has changed over the last fifteen years or so. There used to be very little excuse for not turning up, when the entrance fee was a couple of pounds and there were plenty of places to stand, but the post-Italia 90 surge in interest in the game, coupled with the The Taylor Report, limited the number of tickets available, and introduction of all-seater stadia allowed the ticket prices to be pushed through the roof. I no longer believe that not turning up is an act of disloyalty. It's an act of resistance - a conscious decision to not allow your loyalty to be taken for granted. It's a point that Manchester City supporters made very simply and very eloquently last weekend, and those that run our football clubs ignore it at their peril.
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