The club have to decide how to price the tickets to maximise revenue, especially with larger away followings.
If they dropped the tickets £3 would the attendances increase? I don’t think so. The club alienated the people of the town for years, there were four Blackpool fans in my school year, the rest were United and Liverpool. We need build but it will take time and we can’t throw away revenue in the meantime, we already struggle to compete. That £3 extra for 2000 away fans is 6 grand, we’d never make that back with extra home fans.
You can actually make up most of the difference from a lower price game.
But the point is this is a once in a while thing, to grow the fanbase and maximise support which could be the difference.
Copies much of this from another thread where i did some basic comparisons, but changed the numbers now.
For eg lets say we have 8k season ticket holders.
2k paying home fans of which 300 do so on the day. I'm just going to use adult pricing here for ease of comparison.
2k away fans.
At cat a prices we have
1700 x 28
300 x 30
2,000 x 27
= 110,600
If we drop to 20 quid a ticket flat and obviously 19 for away fans. No on the day price increase.
1700 x 20
300 x 20
2000 x 19
= 78,000
An extra 700 home fans due to the cheaper prices seems achieveable and is another 14000, so that's 92,000.
You'd probably get a few extra away fans coming when it's cheaper too. 100 extra = 1900 plus sales lets say 2000.
Of the extra 700 home fans, 500 spend 8 quid in the bar and also shop sales go up slightly. £4250.
Add that up and you get... £98,250
You also have more chance of attracting these regular attendees for cup games too then with extra income there.
There is of course a more happy medium. Cheap price but with matchday increase.
1700 x 22
300 x 24
2000 x 21
= 86,000
An extra 550 home fans due to the cheaper prices seems achieveable and is another 12,100, so that's 98,100.
You'd probably get a few extra away fans coming when it's cheaper too. 80 extra = 1900 plus sales lets say 1950.
Of the extra 550 home fans, 350 spend 8 quid in the bar and also shop sales go up slightly. £3000.
Add that up and you get... £103,050
Not a million miles off and for a one off its worth having an extra nearly 550 more fans or so. Plus we might not get this many or there might be more who come with the right feelgood factor marketing campaign.
The point is we don't know unless we try. Any slight bit less cash, call it an investment in growing the fanbase for 1 game. You never know, you might get an extra 1k turn up at a lower price. People will be surprised how much price can have an affect.
We won't know how much price is an issue and how many will come at the right price unless we try it. It would be valuable data.
What these price comparisons don't show is if we did a ST holder bring a friend in the east for a lesser game, thats not going to be a sellout away or home, in seats that would have been empty, its almost all a win and all extra cash. Or an east stand special for new and lapsed fans, so may options.
Even if you charge a tenner for them, if they would have been empty so happy days.