Mattyblue

I think that foreign TV deal is still in place, so yeah Sunday at 12pm it is…

Can’t see an enormous following, still a fair trek for a game with no public transport - now say it’d have been a Hudds or Stoke then definitely.

It was holding up fine before Saturday. But looked fairly cut up around the centre circle by full time, we’ll just have to see what they can do with it prior to the Birmingham game…

PNE would’ve have sold plenty more at £25 for a start. £30 was the *cheapest* ticket, the most popular stand for walk ons - JWU was £36. That isn’t the going rate for second division football, and despite our cracking form, we saw our lowest PNE crowd for 40 years - so ‘outrage’ or not, it obviously wasn’t deemed a value price by the respective fanbases.

And that’s the rub TS. Are some ‘boycotting’, yes, but a very small number in the grand scheme of things, are some PL fans? Yes. Can they be enticed back at some point in the future, depending on circumstances? Yes. There’s also the floating fan that comes out for a juicy game or if the club is on a bit of a roll results wise. Many of those have never committed to a ST in the first place, so never really get out of the habit. However, the ones that have gone for good are the thousands of ex-ST holders who went as a matter of routine and whatever the reason was for them initially stopping, they won’t return as they are now well out the habit, now have family commitments, have taken up new hobbies etc etc and wouldn’t even think about giving up every other weekend again - and those are fans a club with our limited fanbase will miss.

Bloody hell TS, we’ve not played them regularly for 40 odd years, so yes ‘different’! 😁

An away that’s a little different, a Harrogate, Carlisle, Halifax, Chesterfield etc. Or a trip to Liverpool or Manchester for a jolly day out.

Of course a winning side puts bums on seats, yesterday being a prime example, that crowd would have been substantially lower if we’d have been mid table. Is he wholly to blame? Of course not, we live in a complex economy and lots of competition for the leisure pound. However he’s put the prices up by about £200 in the last three seasons of attendance, with the last hefty raise after 18 months out of the ground with folk out of the habit, then absolute minimum marketing to boot, just piss poor salesmanship. Three thousand lost ST holders speaks for itself.

£30 minimum price, up to £36 is not the ‘going rate’, at all. As for your example. Supply and demand, Bournemouth have a 10k stadium and are pretty much full each week, whereas…

As I’ve always said, we live and die by ST sales. There were around 7,000 Rovers non ST holders in the ground yesterday, which is excellent for us, especially at those prices, double the standard walk on turn out. But there was still only c14,000 there, and that is entirely due to the collapse in ST sales. If we still had the c10k ST holders of the Bowyer era, we’d have seen a 21/22k crowd yesterday. ‘Season tickets, season tickets, season tickets’ should always be the mantra at this club and Swag has fecked that up royally in his time here.

Marketing tickets just isn’t a thing at Ewood (Sheff Utd being the notable exception). Be it match or season tickets. It’s generally ‘these are the prices, game is in three weeks’. Obviously a winning team is doing the sales push for them…

End of the day 10000+ match tickets were bought with adult pricing at £30-£36. So job done for Swag and there’s not a chance a PNE type game will see anything different in future. In a way he got lucky, as Bizzle alluded to, obviously a 3pm game with the team on a cracking run pushing for 3rd will get floating fans interested. We’d been in 12th and that crowd wouldn’t have been seen. Though 18k isn’t exactly packing them in anyway, but these are the expectations for the modern club. The category system obviously isn’t going anywhere, so I’d be happy enough to see Sheff Utd type deals a few times a season instead. I understand Ossy’s suggestion above but generally multi game bundles don’t really work as floating fans (clue’s in the moniker) generally don’t want to commit to multiple match days. I’d be putting all my eggs in the Hudds bank holiday game, £15/£20 a ticket and set a 20,000+ target… as well as a heavy marketing of the half season ticket holders, in particular to the lapsed. But I think what we all can agree on is once you pass 16/17k, Ewood is a cracking place.

Barnsley is already on sale at standard pricing, so I doubt we’ll see anything.

…and now the upper tier is back on sale again 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

‘Big crowd expected’ the club tweeted. We really have some small time attitudes down there these days if 17k is deemed that…

I see, you know this how?

It’s the Championship, if we end any game with a 2-0 win, 2-0 defeat or a 2-2 draw it isn’t s surprise.

He’s the manager, if it feels it works then crack on. Only on brfcs can he be deemed ‘Moggasaurus’ one week and then given pelters for using modern management practices the next! 😁

… and now the upper tier is back off sale from this evening, and the lower tier back on sale on the day. 🤷‍♂️

They had sold 3,500 in the bottom tier when they took those off sale and made the upper tier available, so they’ll be struggling to hit that much more at this late stage you’d think…

Oh of course, always great to get chatting to all the random folk supporting the Rovers on southern away days.

Probably not, but then it wasn’t us that was always giving it the big ‘un of how ‘if we were int Prem, we’d never take the pathetic away followings you B*stards do’. But as an aside, it’s notable that we consistently sell more away tickets now as a largely mid table second division team, a 1,000 minimum pretty much every game (north or south, even midweek), than we did in the later PL years (price, and consistent thrashings are factors, but interesting all the same).

Of course, a club of their size are not going to keep their away followings high and home ground full, when it isn’t cheap, and the PL novelty has worn off and you are just trying to survive. All fair enough, but they certainly didn’t want to hear it from us back in the day, as it would all be very different if we switched places…

There was absolutely no point in the £20 midweek change, price is not the main reason crowds are lower at night - red button, work pressures, far fewer kids etc. On the back of a 7-0 mauling we had double our usual home turnout for Sheff Utd, sounds good to me. And it was still £15, not a £5, so a decent crowd all things considered and a good start in trying to re-engage. £30-£36 was never standard match day pricing prior to Swag losing his mind this season, and it’s not some big giveaway if you knock it back down to a far more sensible £25, as is the price at many grounds.

I’m not asking for them to be ‘slashed’, just a reasonable price - once you get past £30 it becomes a big psychological barrier - I’ll tell you now if they’d have been, say, £26, PNE would have sold a shed load more for a start. It is up to £36 in the Jack Walker (THIRTY SIX POUNDS!) , the most popular stand for match day buyers. That is a quite ridiculous price for a second division football match, and that would be the case across the league, not just here, as many clubs are not charging their own fans anywhere near £40 for a game.