Quote Originally Posted by dml1954 View Post
Our average home attendance so far is 21300. Assuming that we have about 12000 season ticket holders and an average match ticket price is around £20, then at that price each home game is generating £186000 in extra revenue for the club i.e. £4,278,000 over a 23 game season. Even allowing for 3 games a season at the £5 offer, thats still £3,859,500 extra. Using your figures above that is over £2,700,000 more than having the £5 offer for every game. Quite simply a club like ours can not afford to give away that amount of income every year.

Also adult season ticket holders in the Ninian stand who buy early in March pay £399 or £17.35 per game. Why should they continue to pay this amount when they can see that other people who are buying the tickets on a game by game basis are getting in for £5 a game. Most would stop buying the season tickets and the whole system would fall apart. The club relys heavily on early season ticket purchases to fund it through the summer months and assist with player recruitment. Its great to have the stadium full again but the only sustainable way to do this is to play good football and have success like we are at the moment, with the occassional 'special offer' matches and the ground will soon fill up again, making everyone happy. Once we are in the Premier League with all the TV revenue there will be much more scope to reduce prices if needs be and fill the stadium.
But have you factored in the sales of food and drink? Say the crowd was boosted by 7,000 by the £5 ticket price (as it was last Tuesday). Say 2,000 had three pints of beer and 3,000 had two pints and 1,000 had tea/coffee. Then again 1,500 had pies, 2,500 a plate of chips and 1,000 had other eatables. Then there's program sales say 2,000. I reckon a conservative estimate is gross (not net) revenue of from these sources would be around £20,000 to £30,000 a match. over a 23 game season that equates to close to a million. And if we go on a cup run - well, you can do the math! Makes economic sense to me.