Why don't the club subsidise away tickets?

[bobby1413]

I notice that Swansea City have agreed to subsidise all away match tickets for their fans this year (I think they did the same last year), which means no adult will pay more than £22 for a ticket, consession is £15 with children paying £10.

Article is here: http://www.swanseacity.net/news/article ... 30806.aspx

Reading FC do seemingly care about their fans, but maybe they should really put their efforts into increasing away support, particularly in the long distance, mid week games.

I see that Sheffield Wednesday are charging fans £30 for the 350 mile round trip on a Wednesday night.

Could STAR not get involved in proactively pushing this idea to the club?

(I'm sure this has probably been mentioned before, may have missed it...)

[Winchester Royal]

I don't think the club are motivated to do this when the average home attendances are at the level they are. They're more interested in raising home attendances by introducing a second mascot and a lunatic on a microphone.

[melonhead]

why would a club encourage its fans to give money to other clubs, and in fact give a little bit more money of their own to the cause?


play good football, win games = better atmosphere, more paying fans at your own ground, and also at away grounds.

[bobby1413]

why would a club encourage its fans to give money to other clubs, and in fact give a little bit more money of their own to the cause?

Can understand that view point and also understand the club probably don't care how many fans travel away.

However, from a fans point of view, I just think an increased away fan base would not affect home attendance, e.g. people aren't going to say "I went away to Sheffield on wednesday, so won't attend the home game"... just guessing.

[Winchester Royal]

I do think that attending away games is part of the hook - it certainly was when I was about 16 and started to travel away more regularly. I can't see the club subsiding it, as much as I'd like us to regularly take 2,000 fans away, I don't think it's going to happen. Even as home attendances have risen, away attendances are largely as they were 10 years ago. There's just no financial benefit to the club itself.

[Nameless]

There's been a big push in the PL to sort out excessive pricing for away fans and I think there's a chunk of money that has to be used specifically for that so Swansea may well be using that cash. With the huge income PL can easily do stuff like this.
The economics may not be that attractive for us. 1000 fans at 23 matches at a tenner each is near enough £250,000. Given that almost all away fans will be STH there's not even an offset in increased home sales.
All clubs need to look at prices, £30 is just stupid for a midweek Championship game.

I don't think there is any mileage in Star raising this specific idea , the club will right ask where the money should be taken from. What Star should be doing is ensuring they are part of the wider issue of ripping off away fans....in fact ripping off fans generally.

[WoodleyRoyal]

it should also be noted that Swansea third highest shareholder is Swansea City Supporters Society Ltd at 21% meaning these sort of incentives are much more likely with a supporters group with so much clout
Mr & Mrs Martin Morgan - 23.7%
Brian Katzen - 21.1%
Swansea City Supporters Society Ltd - 21.1%
Huw Jenkins - 13.2%
Robert Davies - 10.5%

[Sutekh]

There's been a big push in the PL to sort out excessive pricing for away fans and I think there's a chunk of money that has to be used specifically for that so Swansea may well be using that cash. With the huge income PL can easily do stuff like this.
The economics may not be that attractive for us. 1000 fans at 23 matches at a tenner each is near enough £250,000. Given that almost all away fans will be STH there's not even an offset in increased home sales.
All clubs need to look at prices, £30 is just stupid for a midweek Championship game.

I don't think there is any mileage in Star raising this specific idea , the club will right ask where the money should be taken from. What Star should be doing is ensuring they are part of the wider issue of ripping off away fans....in fact ripping off fans generally.

Perhaps this is more for the FSF to get to grips with and stop clubs charging idiot amounts for away fans - SWFC and ITFC in particular are the big culprits in this division.

Isn't there already a rule that away fans should not be charged more than home fans for equivalent seating so I presume fans of these two clubs also get hit with the same idiot pricing when playing Reading.

[WoodleyRoyal]

There's been a big push in the PL to sort out excessive pricing for away fans and I think there's a chunk of money that has to be used specifically for that so Swansea may well be using that cash. With the huge income PL can easily do stuff like this.
The economics may not be that attractive for us. 1000 fans at 23 matches at a tenner each is near enough £250,000. Given that almost all away fans will be STH there's not even an offset in increased home sales.
All clubs need to look at prices, £30 is just stupid for a midweek Championship game.

I don't think there is any mileage in Star raising this specific idea , the club will right ask where the money should be taken from. What Star should be doing is ensuring they are part of the wider issue of ripping off away fans....in fact ripping off fans generally.

Perhaps this is more for the FSF to get to grips with and stop clubs charging idiot amounts for away fans - SWFC and ITFC in particular are the big culprits in this division.

Isn't there already a rule that away fans should not be charged more than home fans for equivalent seating so I presume fans of these two clubs also get hit with the same idiot pricing when playing Reading.

I'm not a fan of dictating to a club on what their pricing policy should be, they charge the price they do, and if the demand is great enough then it can be justified, if however no one turns up, then they have got it wrong. But who loses out? the club charging said prices. No one is forcing fans to go, they do so on their own accord knowing what the prices are before they go. If you feel it isn't vfm don't go, this is what i do as a consumer in other walks of life, why should football be any different?

[Nameless]

Isn't there already a rule that away fans should not be charged more than home fans for equivalent seating so I presume fans of these two clubs also get hit with the same idiot pricing when playing Reading.

There was such a rule but it's easily got round. It may have been Stoke who painted the away toilets, put soft bog roll in and added white wine to bar list and then said the away end equated to their Premium Lounge and charged a fortune.

Reading don't up their prices for fans of rip off clubs, that would obviously be wrong. You would hope they do challenge away pricing though.

It's been noticeable that all our recent cup games have been very sensibly priced and that is down to clubs working together. If all the Championship sides agreed to have a common pricing policy for away fans it would help but I guess the likes of Sheff Wed and Ipswich don't really care of fewer away fans travel due to pricing....

[No Fixed Abode]

why would a club encourage its fans to give money to other clubs, and in fact give a little bit more money of their own to the cause?

On the flip side. Would it not encourage a bigger away support and perhaps spur on the team more? A few quid to subsidise the expensive Championship tickets is peanuts to the money the club would get in the Premier League........

[Gav]

But wouldn't it also ultimately cause ticket inflation to the detriment of the away club? If the host club knows that having higher prices won't impact away attendance as it has been capped by an outside party, they could hike up prices and force the visiting club to pay over the odds. Scaled across the division this would then lead to the visiting club needing to increase their cap threshold...

I'm pretty sure the described situation would only occur if a significant number of clubs were subsidising their travelling fans, but while I think it's a decent idea as a one off, as a long term solution the economics feel flawed.

Maybe I'm overthinking it though.

[RG30]

PE asked about reciprocal ticketing between clubs, whereby both sets of away fans pay the same price for each fixture, which STAR had raised previously. NH replied that agreement with other clubs was necessary, and that the “model” currently works better in L1 than it does in the Championship (Bradford City for example). This is down to the view of some Championship clubs who believe that they can charge what they want. RB noted that there might be the problem of undercutting home fans, in terms of ticket price, and there might be some difficulty in the organisation of the tickets with regards to the individual teams ticketing structure. NH agreed to look into the feasibility of running a trial with 3 or 4 clubs.

http://star-reading.org/index.php/download_file/view/722/1/

[Ian Royal]

Interesting idea, but it's a no goer until we aren't shit and tedious to watch. You're not going to entice many more people to travel long distances by knocking £10 off a £30 ticket that is realistically only about a third of the total cost of going as long as what they're going to see is a bore draw or loss.

[STAR Liaison]

This whole issue is a complicated mare's nest so I'm not going to try and be comprehensive but will answer a few specific points.

Swansea are the most community-minded of PL clubs, have a smaller fan-base and have further to travel overall than most PL. And their fans sing a lot so it makes good sense to use some of the PL TV windfall to subsidise their away support. You may notice some differences between Swansea's position and our own.

STAR does support / is part of the national Twenty's Plenty 'campaign' to have away ticket prices capped at £20 a head. I'm not sure that the campaign has much leverage in the short term.

As RG30 points out above STAR does raise the issue with RFC and the club is receptive to the idea of trialling reciprocal pricing with other clubs. But this does depend on what other clubs see as their current needs / strategy. Take Sheff Weds for instance - two years ago I paid (from memory) £10 for a match ticket for a Saturday game. Last night I didn't pay £30 for a midweek game. Officials at the Bristol City Supporters Trust I believe boycotted their game at Hillsborough with tickets priced at £39. It's hard to see any coherent strategy at swfc but we do know clubs pore over the numbers in making their tactical pricing decisions.

Personally I think there is a vacant space where there should be some long term strategic thinking about pricing on for both away fans and for midweek games. It wouldn't surprise me if in ten years time we'll be paid to go to away games if they're on TV.

[RG30]

The issue I have is the club (to their credit) charge visiting away fans who are ST/member the member price of £25 yet when it's our supporters visiting them in return the gesture isn't returned. (last night being a prime example, SWFC members £25, RFC fans £30)

[Winchester Royal]

The issue I have is the club (to their credit) charge visiting away fans who are ST/member the member price of £25 yet when it's our supporters visiting them in return the gesture isn't returned. (last night being a prime example, SWFC members £25, RFC fans £30)

It should only be put in place if it's a reciprocal arrangement. I remember we did some arrangement with Barnsley or Sheffield United a few years ago where away tickets were only £10 for the games between the clubs - this sort of arrangement would be welcomed especially for those costly or distant games.

[LWJ]

We should make the arrangement with Burnley, Blackburn, Preston, 'Boro and Hull.. All long trips where neither clubs will bring massive fans especially if prices are high

[STAR Liaison]

The issue I have is the club (to their credit) charge visiting away fans who are ST/member the member price of £25 yet when it's our supporters visiting them in return the gesture isn't returned. (last night being a prime example, SWFC members £25, RFC fans £30)

I take the point but you also point to the better answer in your words 'to their credit'. There are two ways of playing this - one is to set a good example and try and inspire / embarrass other clubs into following suit.

The other is to play tit for tat - if you charge us more we'll charge you more. STAR are getting similar issues over charges for parking coaches at away grounds. Some clubs charge, others don't. Good old Wembley, home of the national game and never likely to play at Reading, charged us over £1 per head of coach passenger to park for the semi-final.

Football, at the Football League level, is completely undecided how to make more money out of fans - whether by treating them better and hoping to grow the market or by exploiting what market you've got as hard as you can. There is no central authority to dictate policy for the good of the game - it's down to the individual clubs and their ever-changing roster of commercial managers. At the moment I sense a general shift towards treating them better but it's not universal.

[Winchester Royal]

It's an interesting balance because the market is both captive and relatively small, so squeezing that market seems counterintuitive when you could grow the market with attractive pricing, and then look to capitalise on it once it was at a sufficient level. No use suffocating it and having 400 die hards at every away game paying £50 a ticket, when you could have 1500 paying £20.