by Readingfanman »
13 Feb 2020 15:56
On the subject of attendance, it has to be pointed out that the club don't help themselves when it comes to ticketing.
This season we'll have had 6 matches with midweek mates rates (5 midweek at home and QPR). That's £60 for 4 tickets. You can buy 2x 4 match bundles as a member for £72 each. That totals £204 and you'll have been to 12 games for £17 on average. To buy the other 11 games is another £220, so a total of £424 to buy tickets across the year.
If you miss 2 matches for example due to holiday, family plans whatever else. You can pull that down to £384 at an average of £18.30
A season ticket in the East stand this season was £375 - assume you are likely to miss the 2 games still, and you are saving yourself a tenner across the season.
If you're saving yourself a tenner across the season, what's the incentive to buy a season ticket? The club isn't selling out unless they start doing really well, so likely you'll have your choice of seat. You may miss out on on away game or 2 potentially but that is pretty much it.
Once you have little incentive to buy a season ticket because of this and can start picking and choosing which games you'll attend, you're bound to start missing more out of choice. Part of our current low attendances I think can be attributed to this.
Really feels like we should be looking at sides like Bradford and Huddersfield for how to market season tickets - Bradford is £150 and Huddersfield £249.
Make it cheap, and fill the stands with season ticket holders would be my current solution to our attendances problem. If you sell 15K season tickets rather than 9K and have a 85% rate of attendance rather than 95%, you're gaining a few thousand on the attendance every week straight away.