Attendance tonight

As it's a tad slow, i thought we'd have a little guessing game....so what do we reckon tonights attendance will be.

I'll plump for:

38,875

41,260

42,790

40,712

39,814

35000

My brother in law is using my card so 39,815!

Attendance was 37,509. Well done Den.

I thank yow ......real shame it wasn't fuller though.....but at £35 a pop are we that surprised?

Get it full, put on a great show and the you can increase prices. Just knock it down a fiver or tenner for starters. £25 a pop and there would have been a few thousand more surely.

It's all economics, isn't it?  If we dropped the price by a tenner a ticket, the club would sell the remaining six thousand tickets - at £25 a pop, would come to £150,000.  If each of these spent an average of £5 at the kiosks, then that would be an additional £30k, bringing the total up to £180,000!

But, the reduced tickets would be £375,090 lost.  So the club would lose £195k overall.

Never mind having a stadium full of fans.  Never mind that those fans would be more likely to be the so-called "working class" fans that make more noise, who would help to lift the team up.  Never mind that this lift might actually have seen us secure that all-important CL win.  That loss is all but Yaya's wage for the week!

That said, the six rows in front of me were largely filled by kids from the Australian youth team and they'd have got those for free.  Free tickets for kids who don't give a flying crap, while the proper fans sit at home or in the pub because they can't afford to go along themselves.  What a joke...

Yeah, that's not on.

As you say, it's a loss of 'the lazy fuckers' wages for a week....just get him to pay for the tickets and he can sit in the stands with fans...he's been a fucking spectator all season anyway!

Maybe they should be thinking..."if we get through the group stage, how much more money can we make?"...as it stands, we'll be lucky to finish 3rd we're that de-motivated and shit in Europe.

Isn't the capacity reduced by 2 or 3 thousand for the CL matches?  With Roma bringing only 1,500 or so fans, we were never going to get 45,000 fans anyway.

A worry would be if the top brass decided to do what utd did and make the CL compulsory as part of the seasoncard. If they did that, I wouldn't renew.

Going off what leo said, here's my take....and it's all rough figures of course.

Last night:
Adults 20,000 fans x £35 = £700,000
Kids/OAP 10,000 fans x £20 (averaged between the 2) = £200,000

7,000 freebies/hospitality = Total £900,000 gate receipts

Reduced prices for next game:

30,000 Adult fans x £25 = £750,000
10,000 Kids/OAP fans x £10 = £100,000

7,000 freebies/hospitality = Total £850,00 gate receipts

So by my reckoning we'd lose £50k on gate receipts but that should be made up easily by the extra 10,000 fans.

Those look like decent numbers, Shaken.  You definitely gave it more thought than I did!

But how about we reduce the hospitality tickets to just 4000?  Sell the other 3000 tickets in a 3:1 split of adults and concessions...  

2250 adults @ £25 = £56,250
750 kids/OAPs @ £10 = £7,500

That's almost £64k more money and, more importantly, another 3000 actual fans.  And we actually end up being up on gate receipts as well!

So if we can work out a way to get the capacity full without actually losing money (if anything, make money), then why can't the wig-wigs at City who get paid to do this, do it?

Hospitality is where the big bucks are. I don't see how we are getting 10,000 OAPs and kids. If we are getting 25,000 adults, the 'loss' will be a little higher, but not catastrophic.

What the club need to do is find a formula that fills the stadium, mainly with local and loyal fans. who are paying to go, not freebie freeloading out of towners.

Then they can increase the prices slightly until they find the right balance.

If we were sweeping teams before us, I'm sure the ground would be fuller.

Because they've got to play nice with the corporates who give them money in the form of sponsorship.  Because it's no longer enough to just have advertising in the ground any more.

As for freebie tickets to kids, how about putting them up in the gods along with the away fans?

I guess being on terrestrial TV didn't help either though.

Yeah, and there's another thing.  Why are our home CL games on ITV and the away games on BT Sport?  Why not the other way around?  How about doing us fans a favour, eh?  I mean, it's not as though the sport could make the vast sums without us, is it??