Anybody else anticipating an ifollow debacle on Saturday? (Obviously wouldn’t just be a Rovers issue).

Premier League here we come then! Because as we know it’s only FFP stopping our owners bankrolling us to the top! ?

Each to their own, but I watch far more Championship than the PL. Most game’s in this league actually have something riding on them and most teams go out to win, unlike game after game of safety first PL football as half the league tries to avoid relegation and mid table bore fests like Crystal Palace v Southampton

Interesting point, I’d say there’s a chance L1 and L2 mothballs without help - and reading a Gary Neville interview in the Times this morning, wearing his Salford hat he hinted that no help will be arriving from the PL.

You’ve missed my point morten. I’m not talking about the ‘Waggott Tax’, general ticket reductions and offers, be they match day or STs and all the rest of it. That is old world stuff. Initiatives to improve crowds can be looked at again in the future, in the ‘new normal’ as they say. I’m talking about the very critical need to maintain the dwindling core we have in the here and now as we try and negotiate this pandemic. And if Waggott doesn’t recognise that ifollow was a blunt instrument that just didn’t appeal to a large swathe of ST holders when pricing next season (next season being whenever fans are back) ‘the 8000’ will become ‘the 4,000’ and we will structurally diminish as a club and should prepare for League 1.

No problem ‘99, as for me it’s the crux of where Waggott has gone wrong since arriving. I always look back to, and I’ve referred to it on here before, about a conversation I had with John Williams in the 2000s. On taking the job as Chief Exec in the late 90s, the board said to him; ‘we have 8,000 fans’ Williams pushed back and said something like ‘Eh? But we 20 plus thousand home fans coming through the gate each week?!’ Their point was, even then, when the club was in an infinitely better position than it is now, that we have to work bloody hard as a club from a small town with unfavourable demographics and a fairly poor local economy in the most competitive region in the country for clubs, with mega sized clubs 30/40 miles away, to maintain and grow our crowds. The ‘8,000’ were a given and you had to work your arse off to keep the rest, don’t take the piss out of Blackburners or they’ll vote with their wallet. Williams therefore knew that he had to be innovative, flexible on price and careful not to piss them off as our fanbase didn’t have the depth of floating fans a city club in a less competitive region would have. 4,000 ST holders don’t renew? Your crowds go down by 4,000 as we don’t have the floating fanbase to take their place and we don’t attract many walk ons week by week, ST holders are the foundation of our support. Of course, the new owners thought they knew better and those people who knew the club and fanbase inside out were jettisoned, ridiculous decisions were made that were slap in the face to fans - like keeping Kean employed in the summer of 2012, so thousands of fans followed them out of Ewood, the vas majority haven’t come back and their seats remain empty. Waggott has since parachuted in at a time, in which through no fault of his own, those long standing ‘Rovers’ people have long gone from the club. So he sees a grand old name, a 31,000 ground, Brockhall, the academy, years of top flight football, and expects that we have the floating fanbase of the club he came from, Coventry, a club from a city three times bigger than Blackburn and a large support base across Warwickshire. But what is his fault, is that he still doesn’t seem to come to grip with the make up of the fanbase. The data surely tells him that our crowds are 80% made up of ST holders, that crowds don’t particularly rise here on good runs of form like they do at clubs from larger conurbations as walk ons aren’t a major factor here, that we have a core that turns out year in year out, and it’s a core that stands up to scrutiny to the core of a lot of clubs in this league, by the way, but we just don’t have the same numbers of ‘floaters’. So just like in Williams’ day, we must do everything we can not to lose ST holders, something he never forgot, but Waggott hasn’t learned in the first place.

I’ve no problem with the club being extremely worried about cash flow, we all should be. However, they also have to think more long term - I.e by ensuring a discount for existing ST holders for whenever we are allowed back - I’m not going to condemn them yet as hopefully they will do just that when the time comes. But I do worry that those running things these days just don’t have the instinctive feel for how the wider ST base behaves that Williams and Finn had, so they’ll offer nowt but a ST edging towards £400 and a good chunk of those fans with little interest in ifollow will just walk away. So the other half of the ST base may well see those fans as ‘not real Rovers fans’ or ‘selfish’, doesn’t matter, they walk away regardless and it’s another nail in the coffin for our crowds and we continue to contract as a football club and competing even at second division level becomes very difficult.

Yes it was a friendly, but the day I enjoy watching a Blackburn Rovers team get beat 6-0 is the day I knock it on the head.

All clubs are.... https://www.efl.com/news/2020/june/the-journey-continues-as-the-sky-bet-championship-schedule-and-tv-selections-confirmed/ 2019/20 Season Ticket holders will not miss any of the action as all home and away fixtures will be streamed via a Club’s iFollow (or equivalent) service

You enjoyed watching us get smacked 6-0?

I’m going off on a tangent here, but Barnsley (Barnsley!) having more season ticket holders than Blackburn Rovers can offer no finer example of the marked decline of this great club under this abysmal ownership...

I’m sure a lot of clubs will want to ‘do a Brentford’ but it’s easier said then done. Brentford have been building their method for years. Especially difficult at a club like Bolton that have been stripped bare in recent years.

Well one of them has just recovered from cancer, so yes he will show common sense.

Of course they can’t watch it for real, but it’s fair enough that if you can’t watch a stream you should expect either a refund or a discount next season. People that live far away haven’t paid for a season ticket, so a bit of a daft comparison. End of the day, it doesn’t matter if you think people are unreasonable for expecting a rebate - though most other football clubs and gyms and cinemas etc etc are providing them, it’s about if those with no means to stream or no interest to think it’s unfair - and many will and you won’t see them next season. You may think ‘well feck them! They should just forgo the cash and help the club anyway’, but a moral high ground by people like me and you won’t stop the sight of even more empty seats next season...

I’ll tell the 80 year old couple I know that have been shielding and don’t have the internet to do just that. Cheers!

Good deal for you, it’s a good deal for me, but what about those that don’t want/can’t watch a stream?

I’ve never blamed a fan for anything since this lot darkened our door, every issue we have had in this lost decade is the Rao’s fault and their fault alone. My point is very simple Phil. If there’s no discount for existing ST holders next season, sales will collapse. You seem to think they will offer one and I pray you’re right. But I see no issue in fans lobbying the club, be it groups like the FF or individuals to try and focus minds of its importance.

Change ‘problem’ to ‘worry’ or ‘issue’ if you want? But yes, the problem/issue/worry is very few people will contact the club as they don’t see/aren’t particularly bothered about the bigger picture. So, coupled with ‘great job Rovers!’ on social media they will carry on down a path I think will cause great harm to the club, I just know how our ST base behaves. And that’s just the way it is, most fans aren’t like me, I knock about with a few that are as fanatic as me, but the majority of Rovers fans I know have more of a transactional relationship with the club. They will be either happy with the package, so will crack on, or they think the club are taking the piss and won’t renew. Neither group will give it much further thought than that. But it’s us that remain that will have to pick up the pieces/see us decline ever further, so if the likes of me, Arbito can write to the club, then we will, even if we know it will fall on deaf ears...

A club owned by local people, that are also fans, just contrast the warmth and connection to their community that you can feel in that letter to the hired hands running our hollowed out organisation...

Don’t you worry I will be doing.

Eh? Think you’ve completely mis-read the post. I am happy enough with the arrangement personally, I’m eagerly awaiting moaning about ifollow already, nobody should feel guilty about watching it, I won’t be, but I’m looking at the bigger picture of the fanbase, and if the no refund turns into no discounted rate for existing ST holders next time round, we will see mass non renewals, in my opinion - and as we know non-renewal usually means a lost fan. The 5,000 of so ST holders that were happy with the arrangement will simply have even more empty seats surrounding them and the future support base of our club becomes ever more eroded, that matters more to me than the fact I got to see a mid table clash at an empty Milwall...

Problem is too many fans just think, ‘well, I’ll watch the stream, don’t see the problem?’ I’ll be watching it, but I know many fans aren’t like me, and more importantly I know the ‘collective’ mind set of many Rovers fans, and history has shown us they don’t take too kindly to having the piss taken (doesn’t matter if you think the club isn’t taking the proverbial, it’s what they feel), and that retribution is normally doled out by not renewing STs and quietly walking away - see 1960 and 2012 for prime examples.

Any other clubs available to hand us a thrashing? It’s great for development!

@only2garners Did the FF make it clear to Waggott, not withstanding the obvious cash flow issues the club has, the potential cataclysmic drop in ST sales if the club brushes off the need for any kind of discounted price for next season? (Apologies if you didn’t attend)

Car parking season passes too? Best not pull at these threads, don’t want the bailiffs in...