Watching the highlights and realising just how empty the West Upper West Lower, East and North Lower are.
I think a few of us suspected that the good start to the season won't have the responsive pick up that I reckon a few at the club thought would happen.
Without closing either the North Upper or relocating the Family Quad, its gonna take a hell of a lot of hard work to fill the lower aspects of the ground without freebies.
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And only if we're in the top 6 with a few games left will there be over 2k more home fans turning up if we're lucky
Unfortunately many people just had enough,it will take a while or maybe promotion to get the crowds back.
I took my mother in law, brother in law and nephew yesterday, because I belatedly found out how cheap tickets were. Brother In Law and nephew were £20 for the two and MIL £11, and we had good seats in the Upper West.
If I only found out about the cheap pricing by accident I bet that there are a lot of absent fans who perceive the cost of tickets to be much higher. I do think the club could do well to advertise quality football alongside good value for money pricing.
Its all very well telling those that listen to Charlton Live, go to the Valley etc, but it may be time to promote in Kent in local media on a regular basis so that the message overcomes existing perceptions.
So prices are back down and we are top six...the missing ingredient is promotion. Not looked beyond Wolves and Boro at home but we need something big around home games in a month or two.
There's a very clear statement in the standard, almost a challenge - "if we are chasing promotion AND there's a good vibe then we will strengthen the squad"
Perhaps fan organisations with thousands of contacts should work with the club to fill some of those 8,000 empty seats?
- One is a historically large ground which barely gets half filled anymore (The Massives)
- 11 are the only major team in the city/town/region
- The other one, Birmingham, only has 2 others teams to compete with for fans and their attendances are worse than ours
Meanwhile, not only do we have several Premiership and Championship teams in London, we're in the most expensive city in the UK and one of the most expensive in the world so we face added overheads for running the clubs, meaning we can't lower ticket prices lightly. A lot of people genuinely don't know what division we're in any more, and we've been out of the Premiership for too long for anyone to really care. The next largest stadium, Fulham, have had pretty poor attendances this season already and they've only just dropped out of the Premiership. I'd rather have a great ground like ours and have regularly large sections of empty seats than grounds like the toolbox.
Hopefully we can continue initiatives like Football for a Fiver or start giving free tickets to outlets/charities in the community, or offer free tickets to those in the services? An empty seat won't generate money, but a free ticket will mean programme sales, food and drink sales, maybe 1 in 20 people who get a free ticket will get a season ticket?
When I was at Sheffield University the Massives kept throwing free tickets at students, surely we could do the same? Especially with our UoG sponsorship deal.
That said I would list the game as of the best I remember for ages. We played some great football, we defended with our lives, the opposition were diving, niggling and, frankly, being total ar$ehole$.
By the hour mark I wanted to win this game more than I can remember wanting to win a game (ignoring the mist wins of last season) for a long time.
Anyone who was there must have felt something like it. The TV coverage and the descriptions of the game should help - beating three teams expected to be in the promotion shake up should help, being unbeaten after six games should help but we are still a second division team and we have had a torrid six years.
I think we are on the right track, I think attendances will improve, having an international break before the season has really got going is hardly helpful.
I agree with both SR and PA but I am, I think, much more optimistic that we will get closer to our realistic ceiling this season.
My view is that the previous two years could have gone better if the Club were fully committed to a genuine collaboration. They made noises they were but it never seemed to happen despite a very promising start when TNT was distributed by programme sellers and we did a joint survey.
Unfortunately the new senior management didnt seem too interested in our last genuine bit of collaboration around the matchday experience survey. Hopefully there is some explanation for that.
I have however been talking to the new Catering company who seem genuinely keen, about sharing research and ideas and am hoping for progress there; As well as being able to participate in Club development. See FF minutes when they are released.
I'm sure a minority on here would love it to be his fault .
About 3000 watford.
we have lost fans over the last year but so have everyone else.
a couple near me who have been season ticket holders for 50 years, did not renew this season because
big Powell, Yann, and Hamer fans who thought we had sold out.
I tried to convince them that things would improve as better players would be coming to the club in the summer,
which happened, but they called it a day.
Don't think it's helps with BT and Sky both showing 12.45 matches, even thou a lot of us watch the game in pubs or the club bars before the game.
we have a range of prices so that shoudn't be the issue.
Numbers will improve, it's marketing, cost, and shit home football the past two seasons which prob people got fed up with and maybe not so many freebies which where handed out over the last few years.
A good first 6 games isn't all people look for in going to football, it's going to take some out of the box thinking to get us anywhere near 20k let alone full.
Since I was on the board already, I am freely admitting collective responsibility. We know that certain members of the management team were neither competent nor helpful to us - and they have departed - but nobody likes to be lectured on their job by outsiders. That was my point to SR.
Our problem began in 2006 with relegation from the Premier League and although our crowds held up well until we went down again they were always on a steady decline. It can and will improve but won`t happen overnight!
There have been too many false dawns in the past and plenty of times when you buy a ticket full of optimism only for that balloon to be burst at about ten past three on a Saturday.
Sounds fickle I know,but that's modern day football for you.
The average home attendance last season was 16134 and that will probably be near the same mark this season. To me the £150 season ticket has seen probably 75% of people moving from other parts of the ground to save money. The club are using a fair match day ticket price at present, but we will always be around the 16000 mark unless one day we go back to playing Premier League football.
It needs a fairly classic marketing approach IMO - retain the regulars (lots done on this around season tickets), get the occasional fans to become regulars, get lapsed to become occasional fans again, and get new/ prospects to start coming along. I'm sure the Club are aware of a lot of this, but when I interviewed KM for Trust News (get your copy on Tues if you haven't already) she gave a heartfelt plea for fans to help with this, admitting that she doesn't really understand what the Club needs to do to build the attendance. She too finds it a bit upsetting to see a half empty stadium.
Definitely a role for FF, Trust, individual fans etc to help out with ideas, and they are willing to listen it seems. But in the end, it is the employees of the club who need to assess feasibility/ practicality and then implement the ideas, including finding budget for them - it has to be a partnership.
Recognising there is a problem is maybe the first step in building it back up again.