Season tickets announced:

Club Notices General
21

To quote Chad Junior;

This is the issue. Dragging more people through the turnstiles is what increases our income streams in the LONG TERM. Putting up the admission prices increases revenue in the short term, but the only that this is sustained is by a further increase the following year, and then the next year, and then the next year again. We need to be looking at the BIGGER PICTURE.

For example, early season last year we were averaging about 270 i beleieve? Maybe less. So;
06/07 - 270 x £8 (it’s only make beleive so we’ll go with the highest possible figure) = £2160
07/08 - 270 x £9 = 2430 so we’re up £270

Now we ended the season with a few gates of closer to 400, so that’s almost 150 fair-weather fans. If we can keep those coming, and build on it, then that would work out at;
370 x £8 = 2960 which is up £530 on a £9 admission fee with a lower attendance.

My concern isn’t about what i am paying to get in, i’ll be there every week, it’s about trying to entice more people down. That is what will increase turnover in both the short and long term.

Any marketing geezer worth his salt will tell you to see more of anything you either need to;
a) reduce costs to the consumer, or
b) offer a better product. Regardless of how good a team we will be next year, regardles of the football we will be playing, the product we are offering is still Unibond League football. And the best we can do is finish off 1 place higher in the league, so it’s not possible to say we’re gonna finish 10 places higher than last year.

My concern is attracting more people down to watch us, that’s all. On a seperate note, Vics are freezing their prices at £12. Therefore it’s only £3 more to watch Conference football next season. So if you are just a random football fan with a spare Saturday afternoon to kill, what’s to say you wont prefer to watch a higher level of football - more than likely featuring a professional side - for the added outlay of just £3?

22

Burscough have released their season ticket prices for next season - £150 for adults!!
Arent they in the league above us now aswell??!!

23

Eek! :o £9 seems like a lot of money. I’ve no problem paying it, after all what value can you put on watching "your" team? Potential new spectators might however think it looks a bit steep…

The comparison with V**s is rather unfair though. First of all £12 is a lot to watch a team struggle in building site style surroundings, being fleeced for half as much again for the kids and some might question where the money ends up anyway.

At least our £9 will go towards getting success on the pitch and I’ve confidence in the way that’s going. Although I’m sad to see MM go, none of the other departures are a great loss, Brodie is an excellent signing and I can’t quite credit how we’ve got Adam Warlow on a permanent deal, never mind Connors et al playing below their level at BPA, Adam could almost certainly have got a decent deal elsewhere and just needs the right partner up front. I see that our dear friend Steve Foster has gone to Fleetwood, so it won’t be him anyway. Also noticed that Lee Coathup is Benny’s new assistant at BPA-he helped out at Ashton towards the end of last season and surprise surprise Ashton now seem to be losing players heading over the Pennines too. It will never last. Apart from anything else Benny’s managerial record really isn’t very good at all. On the other hand by increasing admission prices we’ll be paying towards what the team does, not some rich benefactor who might get easily bored, and we’ve been there before haven’t we?

Incidentally, there are three main ways to sell a product if my memory serves correctly…competitive pricing, product quality and decent marketing. Maybe we need to persuade a few people that £9 is good value, not just expect them to turn up?

24

You’re point is a good one Robbo, even if you are still wrong ;D

Taking out the Telford league game we averaged 325 fans at home based on the other 20 games. The 10 games up to Christmas averaged 275 and the 20 games after averaged 375, the 100 difference in averages is everything to do with the quality of the football (the ‘product’) and the fact that it was both entertaining and that we had something to play for. The increase from start to end of the season was tremendous.

If ticket prices remained at £8 but this meant no Warlow, no Lloyd, etc the quality of our product is likely to drop. The higher average would not be sustained with a reduced quality of product and before long we would be back at 275 x £8 (= £2,200).

At the moment we have a good manager, a good level of interest in the club and now a very squad, as such we have to be ambitious for next season otherwise we would lose all three of those things!

Putting the price up to £9 may mean that we don’t get the 375 (end of season average) as a result and that we will be more like 325. However 325 x £9 = £2,925, which is a a good increase on the £2,200 we returned in the first 10 games of last season and is the difference between having a poor squad and a promotion chasing squad.

As I have said before you can’t have all the players you want at the same cost! Football does not work this way, sad as that fact may be! We start the season with a great opportunity to push for promotion and above all with the quality of signings and Jim’s management I feel certain we will see the same if not better quality ‘product’ on the pitch next season.

It may still be Unibond football next season at £9 and not £8 but there is a big difference between watching a side at the top of their respective table than the bottom! And as for paying £12 to watch V***s, they had the lowest average attendance in their league by a good 100 fans last year at 972! If they dropped their price to £11 instead of £12, they would need to attract an average of 1,060 fans (nearly 100 more per home game) to achieve the same level of income - would this happen, I don’t think so! Not unless they won more at home!

Would we attract more fans at £8 than £9, I don’t believe the increase makes that much difference. Will we attract more fans at the top of the table than mid table, absolutely we will!

You have to balance it all out and I think the board have made the right decision.

25

Some people are defending these prices by saying we will be top of the league and will be playing attractive football. What if were not,and were only averaging 250 fans every other week.Or if Warlow,Lloyd etc get injured and are out for the season(i hope not but it could happen!)are we still going to charge these prices if we’re struggling mid table? Then we’d be paying £9 for a mediocre product wouldnt we??

26

You’re basing your arguments on a) the fact that eveyone can afford to pay out the extra £1 as easily as yourself. We aren’t all rolling in the dough sunshine. And, b) that money buys success. Using your Leeds analogy from earlier, Leeds payed out big bucks for a team but then didn’t perform. Therefore they are now in a worse situation than ever. There’s a small term of ‘living within your means’. We need to take heed of this. Raising prices at some point has to become finite. Where do we go from there if we continue to want to bring in high quality players??? We need to get more people in through the turnstiles, and we can’t just presume that just because we are happy to pay whatever it takes to get there that every other tom dick or harry in Northwich will feel the same way. I hope that sand you have your head in doesn;t chafe your ears Mr Bunny!!

My point regarding Vics is that if you have no love for either club in northwich, then if you are a casual football fan you may be more likely to pay £3 more to watch the likes of Oxford, York, Exeter, etc NOT necessarily the scum.

£9 isn’t a massive amount to shell out, but if your budget is £10 per home game and you normally buy a pint or a program with your £2 change, then you’re still only spending a tenner and the club aren’t any better off in the long run. These are the points i’m making. An extra quid a head on admission prices isn’t necessarily more money coming in each week.

27

Robbo, since when have you lived within your means!

So, we have established that you would have prefered that we kept admission prices at £8 rather than signing Warlow and Lloyd!

Are you really sure in your arguement that casual supporters will opt to pay £3 more to watch Vs than us, the off the field activities and league position also have a huge influence on that decision. People want to be entertained by watching football and to feel that the team they are watching, irrespective of division, has a chance of winning. I don’t believe on the evidence of last season that we have anything less to offer. The Unibond was arguably one of the most exciting leagues in the country last year, a three way chase for the title with it won on goal difference of one is more entertaining for any neutral than say Vs home 0-0 draw against Stevenage during the last week of the season (or their 0-3 home defeat to Burton the game before). How many casual supporters that watched those games will be tempted to go back?

Quality, attractive, entertaining football will bring people through the turnstiles, at £8, £9 or £12. Quality costs money! For a man that drinks Bulmers instead of draught cider and chooses Stella instead of Fosters (to put this into terms you will understand) I thought you would understand this?

Money does not guarantee quality but the combination of a good squad and a good manager gives you a much better chance of success.

28

Last season the supporters were a credit to the support of WAFC in donating continual additional funds so that Jim & Co could enjoy a settled group of players throughout the season. However this was ‘additional’.

The weekly budget had to be found from somewhere (on top of bills to pay, bar staff wages et al) and, with the increase in budget that the Board have decided upon to enable the football management to go one goal better next season - also needs to be found each week.

There is no guarantee that the euphoria of the latter part of the season will see any increase in gate - even if it had stayed at £8. Attracting additional fans to non-league football is difficult, particularly in a town that has two teams trying to attract a football fan base but you’re either a Witton fan (paying £9) or a NVFC fan (paying £12). Just because we are £3 cheaper won’t entice many of the other team to come and watch us as, conversely, neither will many (in fact none) of the staunch Wittoners go over there just because they are playing York, Torquay or whoever.

As that ‘Pesky Wabbit’ states - if you want quality in the guise of Rob Lloyd and Adam Warlow and the other players on our books for next season - they command a decent wage - we have to pay them somehow.

If, as Robbo & Mike Y state, we are frightening off potential newcomers - I have yet to see it since our days in the Conference. Most Wittoners contribute the extra £1 (or more) via halftime draw, golden goal, a pie or a cup of tea already. If they wish to save the £1 somehow - don’t buy one!

GE

29

You’re all preaching to the converted here, but you are looking at it through the eyes of people who alreayd love watching non-league football. For the log-term success of Witton Albion we also need to be attracting new ‘fans’ through the turnstiles.

But, it’s great that Lloyd and Warlow have signed on and personally if me paying an extra £1 per home game helps contribute to that then i’m over the moon. But it’s not me, or GE or Rabbit or anyone else who cares enough to post on here that i am concerned about. Your opinions are all based on how YOU feel towards this football club. My concern is from the point of view of repeatedly trying to push Witton to friends, family, colleagues, all last season and getting the same response; ‘How Much?’, ‘8 quid’, ‘Bit steep for me that’. I know it’ll now be even more difficult next year.

If we just keep the same hardcore and continue the logic of ‘if we need a better team we have to charge more on the gate’ then what happens if we don’t go up again next year? We charge £10 the year after? Then if we miss out again, £11? Then what if we do go up - a more difficuly league so we’ll have to charge £15? It has to stop at some point, so what happens when we reach saturation of our current fan base? My point isn’t that in the short-term we are all paying a quid extra. A quid extra may not prevent anybody new coming down any differently than £8 may do, but my worry is that by using this logic then we are saying to be more successfull than last year we need to keep charging more. If the gates don’t go up then we are just continuously going to be charging the same group of people more and more each season with no one new coming down to watch. In the long term it isn’t a great scenario.

I appreciate the board want us to push on next year. god knows we all want that. I just feel that we need to be looking at other ways for long term increase in revenue streams rather than just the short term option of raising the price. IMHO, for the good of the club LONG TERM we need to be investigating ways of getting higher attendances. Or, we could charge £50 to get in and sign the best team Non-League football has ever seen!

And i NEVER drink Stella :stuck_out_tongue:

30

Oh, so now your happy we signed Warlow and Lloyd and don’t mind paying an extra £1!

I genuinely recognise the point you are making regards other fans, however the number of people we are able to attract at £9 will not be considerably less at £8 (hence my point of would V*** attract 100 more if they dropped to £11).

The issue is that we need to base our budget and spending on fans that we have got rather than those we have not! As for increasing by a £1 year on year and raising it to £15 if we go up - the board will constantly need to review the league we are in and an acceptable ticket charge. My personal opinion is that if we went up next season then £10 would be acceptable (I see another arguement already), if we stay down then I believe that £9 will remain the same (although we may have lost one or two of our prize assets)!

The points you make regards attracting new ‘customers’ and the long term future are all valid, we need to constantly look to build our fan base as difficult as that may be. Attendances at V*** may be a benchmark in terms of football supportersin the town. That said we have ‘spare capacity’ on the terraces and I would like to think that we can launch a number of initiatives over the season (like the bring a friend day) that will help attract people. We need to get as many people ‘hooked’ as possible and need to use our available resources to best effect.

My personal opinion is that even at Conference North level our fan base would probably only increase to 450-475 and of course it will cost more to build a squad to compete in that league. It is a constant challenge to non-league football clubs, however at the moment we are well positioned to capitalise on a good season last year and push harder this time around.

Meanwhile I am pleased that you have decided that £9 is acceptable and that you have not been tempted by the £12 higher value seats across the canal. Maybe now you can stop arguing with me and work out how we find another 100 fans (and if you say drop prices to £8 I swear I’ll scream)!

;D

31

Ii think £7 is more than fair 8)

32

The main inititive people go on about is the kids - they are still free, and a large discount is available for 14-16 yr olds wanting a season ticket.
I’d be interested in comparing other clubs admissions on a like for like basis - very few did free kids admissions last season.

Incidently no one has commented that conc has gone up 50p and 14-16yrs by £1 also.

The whole club is being asked to contribute - not just us adults.

33

I have to say that the fact it is £9.00 wont bother myself, I always allow at least £20.00 a game for entry pints pie programme etc, however the one thing that DOES make a big difference to me is that my lad gets in free, if I had to start paying for him as well then I would be looking at £ 25-30 a game and couldnt justify it, so for anyone with a Family really does get a value day out. ;D