With all the talk of investors and my previous thread about if Charlton are attractive to them, Ive been wondering what is the potential for Charltons fan base and attendances in the best case scenario.
If the plans announced in the mid-2000s to expand the Valley to (eventually) 40,600 became reality do you think we could regularly sell out? In reality thats probably 36K Charlton fans and 4K away fans.
My thoughts are for us to attract these kind of figures every game we would probably need a good decade (at least) of top 8 (maybe higher) finishes in the Prem and another big push to get more Kent based fans to come....
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We've done it in the past.
But for at least one generation, it would not be full of 'Charlton fans'.
Given that we could have got more than 27K for many of our Premiership games – 35K is not that big a jump!
And at the valley too!
Look back to1992... who'd of thought then that 10 years later we would be pulling in 27,000 each week?
In London, for every Charlton fan brought into the world there are about 20-30 Arsenal/Chelsea fans introduced.
If we could tap into this demographic we'd be doing very well indeed.
I believe we could fill about 25k home fans in the right league
Not at the valley though and if its was ever looking likely that we would challenge i would expect tbe noises of the peninsular to reapear and gain momentum
Yes, although I think, if we were in the Premier League the Home / Away ratio should maybe increase. Limiting Man Utd, Arsenal et al to 4k is throwing money away although I accept that for those games, we may sell out the home end and in others 1k Fulham fans in an away end that holds 6k would also be a waste. Flexibility in the away end, so it can be split, maybe?
Campaigns, attractive pricing, Valley Express, promotions are great, they work to get people in the ground and see what it is all about but only success on the pitch will ultimately bring in bigger paying crowds on a sustainable basis. The Club has, since 5/12/92 been very forward thinking and imaginative with ideas to fill the ground and increase income as we had a long term policy and backing at board level to try new things. Doesn't mean more or new ideas shouldn't be tried though. Footballforafiver has been a big success and shows that there is a potential audience out there. But winning games in a higher division will do more than any of the campaigns.
If we had had a 40k capacity Valley in 2000 I think we could have seen averages of over 30k and getting close to 35k. It's an average so for every 23k v Wigan there would be a 40k v Man Utd.
But we didn't.
If we ever had new, rich, ambitious owners then the logical move, in their eyes as non-long time fans, would, IMHO, be to move to a new stadium on the peninsular with a bigger capacity and more potential for match and non-match day income generation. Selling the Valley wouldn't pay for it though.
But we haven't got new, rich owners. Yet. : - )
We might be able to attract such fans for the big games, but for the games against the likes of Stoke and West Brom, we'd have 10,000 empty seats in our 40,000 stadium, if not more.
It's easy to say we're bigger than so and so club, but in reality we're a similar sized club to Palace, and sustaining the sort of long term success for 10-15 years that would makes a generational shift in our support base up to, say the West Ham level, would be expensive and rely on not getting relegated in the meantime.
30,000 would be a more realistic level, maybe 33,000, that's around the size of ground that the likes of Ipswich, Southampton, Derby and Leicester have.
So what are the 'right campaigns' then ?
What hasn't been done in recent years, other than a huge reduction in a ST price, that could potentially fill the ground, that would not adversely impact on income, nor impact on ST holder value / goodwill ?
We regularly have between 13-15,000 empty seats in the stadium at a time when we offer the world and his kids free or discounted tickets, yet half the time don't turn up on the freebies.
Or is that our 1950s revisited?
We werent threatening to win any silverware but more people came because we were playing good football in the top league.
The closest analogy to the level we would need to perform at would be Fulham, or at least the Fulham of the last 4 or 5 years....
Fulham are limited because they have Chelsea down the road to compete with, Charlton dont have a big team nearby to worry about so we have an advantage....
There are a whole raft of initiatives that we CAS Trust would like to explore with CAFC, that we believe would add to our gate incrementally year on year (in real terms) on year and hopefully we can continue on this path and start a formal group to do this, there are 8,000 empty seats doing nothing for the club. I can't say more than that at the moment but so far the signs are positive.