Brezza’s Taxxis ?

What a crap window. 11pm deadline, out of the running at 7:30pm. Question marks over every signing: Harrison Chapman - Injury prone and not fit to play this season Ben Brereton - Inability-prone and not fit to get on the pitch ahead of Craig Conway Brad Lyons - Brad Loans Louie Annesley - A tall child. From Gibraltar. A country that ranks behind Guam. We are 3 points off the play-offs with over a third of the season left but no, we’d rather start off at zero points in 2019/20 and give it a right good go once Brezza comes good. Well, maybe 2020/21. Meanwhile the LT try to talk up Joe Nuttall as the striker of the window. (The same window that we paid up to £7m for a spare one). At least our scouts won’t need to take February off and office staff can have an early night before it gets too icy in the roads - once they’ve put the spare fax machine cartridge back in the safe. (Take it away Biz....)

Sub for the Under 23s, c’mon man be fair. He can’t even get on their bench!

Agreed. Lowering season ticket prices doesn’t devalue the product. If anything it increases the ‘value’ of the product. What it decreases is margin. Low margin sales can bring in as much as high volume sales depending on volume. If we were to get the same amount of revenue from lower ticket prices it would mean a more greatly packed Ewood Park. That’s a good thing in my view. Now, what the bean counters need to work out is what volume change needs to happen to make the same amount of revenue on tickets. Crack that and get the feel good factor back - the one that the club championed last season and that Elliott Bennett extolled this week - and the ancillary sales (shirts, merchandise, concessions) will increase by default. But are ‘bums on seats’ - and the effort that goes into that - part of the agenda of the current senior management team at Rovers? On the evidence so far (lack of good offers, increased ST prices after relegation and promotion, and matchday surcharges) it would suggest not.

Football is absolutely bonkers at the moment. Over £12m for “Brentford’s best player” - a side that haven’t got close to the top flight since WW2! Another couple of million for a 26yo who has never kicked a ball in the PL! North of £15 for Dack, who has played a couple of dozen games in the Championship and half a career in league one! £7m for a fourth/fifth choice striker!

Such a left-field signing. A full international. Young. Tall. It’s about as close as you can get to Europe without being able to call it a foreign signing. If Brexit results in us losing Gibraltar to the Spanish he’ll be on his way! Not much to say until we’ve seen him play. Another one for the future, along with Brezza, Lyons and Chappers. January is a strange time to be bringing in players who won’t contribute this season.

So we can’t bring up the Oxford game numbers because it was a complete one-off but players can?!

You don’t know more than anyone else on here about how the deal is structured but talk expertly about “missing the point”. If the deal was £3m, for instance, with add-ons which could take the deal “up to” £7m then this being common knowledge would take the heat massively off player and manager. But it isn’t, the manager is having to defend the fee by saying “it is just a number and doesn’t matter”. But again it isn’t just a number and it does matter, because we could have had two, even three, very good players for that kind of money. Perception is reality and the perception is that we have grossly overpaid for a player not ready for first team football in the Championship - despite having played a lot in this division. The signing is an odd one and the debate will continue until he finds form and looks like justifying a fee. Theres nothing worse on a messageboard that people saying “can we just stop discussing whatever”. No, if people want to discuss it, let them. If people don’t want to discuss it, stay out of the discussion. It really is that simple.

It’s the principle. Greater revenue through high volume even at lower margin as opposed to keeping volume low by maximising margin.

The trouble is, for every time you post that it’s a max price, someone else is saying it’s £7m plus add-ons. You can’t both be right!

Change of caterer in the family room?

I’d like to think you are right! Kind of pisses on Brezza’s Monster Munch though.

This is the dichotomy though. Anyone who thinks Blackburn Rovers under Venkys is reliant on gate receipts to keep the club solvent, let alone competitive, is sadly mistaken. We are wholey and absolutely beholden to Venkys propping the club up or selling to someone else who will, or even somebody who would need to maximise income from ticket sales. We need PL football to change our circumstances and sooner rather than later. Having 18,000 fans getting behind the team would support that aim far more than an extra fiver per game from 10,000 of them. As long as Venkys are here, they need to be subsiding the club to get as many fans in as possible. If the Rovers Trust were in charge rather than Venkys, I’d be more inclined to agree with you.

“Let pricing and surcharges do it instead.”

He’s right, it wouldn’t look good. But because of someone’s lack of scouting or over-estimations it is necessary. They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t, and it doesn’t necessarily help Damian Johnson, but that lad needs game time. If they can’t behave like grown ups then it’s going to take a short “injury” to Brezza allowing rehabilitation minutes, or an injury to one of his teammates, and an unlikely goal to get him off the mark. The longer this goes on, the worse it gets. I’m one of their biggest critics but even I would welcome him in the U23s as it’s the right thing to do in the circumstances. Instead I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone is actively looking to loan out Nuttall to make room...

Which means he’s on less than half of what we are paying Brezza.

Good post, good idea. But I don’t buy it. We buy British because of Mowbray in my view. And his semi-obsession with getting the right players to fit into the group, whether noble or otherwise. We’ve done it with players for some time who done fit into the academy cast off criteria. Not on the scale suggested. Dack, Bell, Smallwood, Samuel and others. We seem to have lots of different methods, youngster (Lyons, Candlin), ex academy (Rothwell, Brereton), ex Mowbray clubs/contacts (Smallwood, Armstrong, Samuel, Caddis, Downing), better players in L1 (Dack, Bell), timing (Rodwell), as well as loans (Reed, Palmer) I think Brereton is this season’s Jordan Rhodes and Assombalonga is a pipe dream.

He’s extremely well thought of. Hope it isn’t just pity!

Our recent record of reduced season ticket pricing - which is the discussion - shows that we do increase gates so I’m not sure why you are talking about specific ticket promotions. Although, we haven’t really tested those enough under Waggott to say one way or the other - except the Oxford game, which people believe we should ignore. However, if we had charged £25 per ticket I sincerely doubt we would have had the gate that we did. But ignoring that, your third para is the important one in my view. It is the total package and the perception of value for money that is important. We are all different and have different income levels but £15 per game is probably the limit when it comes to happily committing up front for 23 games. But consider that if we offered a £179/£199 season ticket with some marketing and we would be looking at gates north of 18k per week. In my opinion. 25k when Leeds rock up. Sadly, the club would rather charge double and have half the fans. That’s how it stands today, as I see it.

The key to increasing ST sales is price. The current price point is using fans as a cash cow and doesn’t encourage growth. 10,000 fans on a match day is nothing to shout about.

Everything else had been said so a slightly different take on this but I’m always slightly bemused when the S*n tries to curry favour with scousers.

The person who changed his wiki probably posts on here. C’mon, whoever it was, own up...

Assombalonga (he needs a shorter nickname, maybe “Somba”) coming in - which I doubt despite @Madon‘s record with these things - would surely mean Brezza or Nuttall out on loan. If Gally is in too, then both. A very odd rumour to get going for the final week of the window. Maybe Balaji wants us to be PL next season rather than wait for Mowbray to get Chapman up to speed by 2020/21.

Yeah, Assombalonga fits the criteria. He’s neither British nor cheap!

Assist from Lyons, Jackson goal. The young lad did well there. Excellent burst, strength and cross.