Oakwell is big enough to do it so no excuse there and wouldn't it be better to have the ground full rather than half-empty? the atmosphere would be much better. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
We've been over this many times and I believe the standard response is either it just wouldn't work™, or something about catchment areas.
Huddersfield, with a bigger catchment area than us, increased their gate by 6,000 thanks to lower season ticket prices and a good season. Compared to the previous season the money from their gate receipts were far less than the previous season. QED.
There's a massive risk. The club know how many registered fans it has who occasionally buy tickets. It's unlikely someone who doesn't come at all ever is going to buy a season ticket at whatever price. So you are only likely to attract existing fans. Making them too cheap would therefore risk the total income - it's not quite as simple as this, but roughly speaking if you halved the price you'd need to double the sales to get the same revenue. If the club don't think that's likely they won't risk it. And I don't think our st's are particularly expensive anyway - plus my sons was free!
the club don't know how many shirts to buy in so guessing how many tickets are liable to be sold is way above them.
Seem like excuses to me, Huddersfield weren't doing that well until recently and don't have a huge fan-base and have had cheap tickets in the past not just recently.
Are the club even in charge of the club shop? Regardless, that isn't relevant to this, much as some love an opportunity to have a dig at the club for everything they are perceived to have done wrong. Yes they could have stocked more shirts last season. Though you'd imagine they need to order them in at least batches of 1000 - of which they may have sold out - or sold about 100 and left with 900 unsold useless stock items. They didn't get it right but they hardly need hanging for it. You can see why they'd restrict the initial outlay. As for the season ticket prices, Bradford started at £150 for adults, very good. Only if they purchased by the start of April. Hope it worked for them. Same price for oap concessions, and the price now is £299. That's not much cheaper than we are charging and considerably more for pensioners - of which we seem to have a lot. It's been said before, we have an unusually high proportion of oap concessions amongst the st holders. We need to attract younger fans - so up to 2 free or negligibly charged st's for kids with every adult (and I believe even pensioner) purchase is a fair tactic. But we also don't need to be alienating the current flock by not discounting pensioner tickets. We also have a lot of occasional fans - we make decent money on ticket sales, often on the day. Bradford have no cash turnstiles whatsoever this season, we will have - except for the few all ticket matches against the local massives presumably. As for Huddersfield, given they are getting c£200million over the next two or three years even if they die on their arses, the fact they are offering season tickets for £200, and only £100 to the ones who have had one for eight seasons or more, is pretty much neither here nor there. It has been proven that even selling tickets for games for five or ten quid doesn't sell out the ground still - offering adult st's for £150 wouldn't make us shift 15-17000 of them, especially if that meant charging more to kids and pensioners than we do now.
But Huddersfield did attract many fans who rarely went before. Also significant to note the generous pre- match-day offers too.
Just had a look and the wider borough population of barnsley is similar to Huddersfield. Not a huge difference really.
I suspect they will too, the fans asked for it, the club did it and they were taken up I believe in decent numbers. Works for all parties. The fact we don't offer a cheap deal like the club based in the fifth biggest city by population in England - bigger than Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle, and another club who are in the premier league, I will not vilify the club for.
There are also a lot of other catchment areas bigger than Huddersfield in the 94 other football league and premier league teams that don't do it. And twenty odd national league sides. None of those do it either as none of those clubs find it viable or desirable. But yeah Barnsley get it wrong again.
Correct I went to college in Huddersfield and loads I know that don't really even follow football have season tickets for something to do on a Saturday because of the price and it got them hooked
I think it's pretty indisputable it would cost us a significant amount of money. Cheap tickets on a one off match basis rarely have any major impact on attendances. I think Patrick Cryne or someone said we were already one of the top performing clubs in regard to the ratio of attendance to catchment area. For me, I doubt many adults would be won over. I'd be happy to see them try something with kids of maybe 14 or under though. That's the age to try and grab their support for the future.