Thetownend.com

Town release season-ticket prices for 2014/15
           
           


  SWINDON Town have released details of how season tickets to the County Ground will be priced and structured for next season.

           

http://www.thisisswindontownfc.co.uk/news/headlines/11015615.Town_release_season_ticket_prices_for_2014_15/?ref=rss
           
           
           

Are those bronze prices actually cheaper than current prices?

Be interesting to see what teams visiting the CG next season will be deemed to Gold.

Can't think of too many - so I hope they dont just invent a few Gold games for the extra money

Don't think league 1 clubs should be catagorising games personally

I'm not going to be tempted to buy a season ticket by the current deals. However, as 20 of the sides we're likely to face should be classed as Cat C games, I'm happy to pay £23 and pick and choose games. Cat A game (City or the Pox?) prices will keep attendances around the 8k mark for those games. Big fail.

Apologies of this has been covered elsewhere, but £27 for certain league games is an absolute piss take.

Do Bradford still only charge a tenner for their games?

On the plus side they are doing the interest free installment, plus my son isn't 10 until august 10th so he gets another junior reds free year. The Jr fee has gone up £5 I think.

Its a shame the board doesn't try the bradford/huddersfield model and give really cheap tickets for a year. Would be a good way to see if anyone is interested in the club beyond the 5.5k that turn up every week and the 2k that show up some times.

Yes

I wonder if the "Gold" category isn't really aimed at League games but is in there in case we get another Cup tie like Chelsea this season. But yes, clearly, £27 for 3rd Division football is bloody ridiculous. And I don't care if other clubs are charging a similar amount, that just means they're being bloody ridiculous too

We don't have the fanbase to make that a realistic option. Our fans are apathetic at the best of times.

I will be getting a season ticket this year, had one since the age about about 6 until we got relegated in 2011 but decided against it the past few years.. Which has been a terrible idea as I end up forking out to go to each game anyway!

I agree entirely and its a shame. I understand the business merits of charging the people who will always go more, but they really need to do something about growing the fanbase. Its a much larger questions of how you do that obviously. 

I've had one every season for 12 years (since uni finished) but i'm seriously questioning if i want to this next year. A key part of being a fan is the dream that we can be a bigger and better team. I don't see that desire in the club/town anymore. Power doesn't seem to have a plan to help the club. He is cutting costs and putting up prices to try and break even and then get promoted and flip the club for a profit. I've said it many times but something has to be done to push this club forward and that takes investment either in youth facilities and improving the status of the academy, or developing a new stadium and other revenue streams.

Anyway i think prices are going too far. £37.5 a month to watch 2.3 games a month or for example for £15 a month i can watch as many cinema releases as i want whenever i want.

I can't see many part-timers being tempted to the (slightly) more glamorous league games by £27 a ticket, but yes they probably would pay that to watch a decent PL side in the cup.

I probably would have been tempted to buy a ST if the price was the same as renewals. I can't see why the prices couldn't be the same for the first month of renewals.

I think Power is the chairman we deserve, personally. The football club is arguably the best thing the Town has and no one can be fucked, bar about 7K of us every other Saturday (and I'd wager a good percentage of them are out-of-towners anyway). And there are many in that figure who will happily turn their back on it because we don't win enough away games (see; Twitter), or the manager, who has taken a 50% slash in budget, only has us sitting in 8th (the nerve).

We don't deserve success as a club. Maybe if the council took an interest and were proactive about joining forces with the owners we could get somewhere, but until we have a Chairman who is willing to make a huge personal loss to ensure long term success we won't ever be anything more than what we are now. And it's a shame, the Town is pushing 200,000 people and could be huge, particularly with the catchment area we have.

I think we are going to see a big drop in ST next season, last year we were still looking good for automatics when renewals were up which enticed many to renew especially with the uncertainty of ownership which has now been clarified. We all know what the model of sustainability is now which unfortuinately will only ever see us mid table L1 with the odd flutter with the top 6 for the foreseeable future. It is sad that the club is not supported more by the council and the general public of the Town  but I really cannot see that changing with the saturation of Permiershit games on TV. Neither of my boys are that interested anymore so I will probably pick and choose games which is a shame as we have had our seats for 6 years.

Well im hardcore and have just renewed.

Im a better fan than all of you 8)

Unfortunately my son turns 11 in November, so it will be a £500 outlay now for the two of us.  It may be that I give mine up and he continues going with my dad (assuming he renews).  I need to have a good think.

Can understand that. It's a lot of cash Jo. I don't think we are massively out of step with other clubs but at the same time it's getting an expensive funny old game across the board.

Fitton tried the Bradford approach, it had some success to be fair in that it got us over 5k season tickets for the first time bar the Premier League season in recent history.  It also reversed a slump that had seen us continually get between 2k and 3k every year.

The problem was, we needed more than 6k to make it work, so we have since reversed away from that and as much as people have moaned a little in recent years, we've done well to maintain 5k+ season ticket sales.

We do seem to have a bit of a ceiling to attendances, and if you think about it in pure hard cash terms, if the same 7k turn up every week no matter what we do then the only way of growing revenue from them is to charge a little more.  If it causes a down surge in demand, it will soon be reversed, but it probably won't, and that is why all clubs charge the same.

It costs me less to renew than it did to buy new at the start of the season, which is nice :)

If people can't afford the extra £2 a month increase buying through finance, then they really shouldn't be buying a season ticket regardless of price.

Sadly agree with most of this,  fear that teams like Swindon are going to continue to stagnate as the fans lose interest and there is this almost stand off of fans demanding investment but refusing to accept higher prices on one hand but at same time berating owners for not throwing money at it. 

Power strikes me so far as a reasonably intelligent guy, but I still see little way he can money here.

But could be worse,  we could be mid table premier team with little to play for each season bar avoiding relegation,  at least we mix it up with a promotion and relegation fairly regularly.

Heaven forbid!

It's not just about being able to afford it, it's more about whether I can justify spending  £500 to watch Swindon Town after some of the utter shit I've seen in recent weeks.  Some of us with kids have an awful lot of other things to pay out for as well on a monthly basis and unfortunately I'm not a bottomless pit of money.

The problem is that they need additional non match revenue, but they don't want to take a long term view of the situation.  If you think of the opportunities for conferences, exhibitions, weddings etc that other stadiums get, I get so annoyed that all they can look to do is squeeze it out of the same 6k - 7k fans who turn up   

Got told tonight that they have raised the age of concession tickets to 65 from 60, kept that quiet, be a few who have had concessions who may not bother to pay full price.

How you spend your money is how you spend your money but I don't, and never will, understand the argument of "performances are rubbish so I won't bother". It's league one football, you know what you're getting.

If you have life situations that mean you can't afford it that's fine and understandable but I fail to see how that's the clubs problem.

I don't mean to sound like a knob (for a change)

Well it might help if Jed and Co hadn't mortgaged all the catering etc for the next decade last summer

The catering co can't be too bothered making their money back, they didn't even open the snack bar at the Town End end of the DRS.

.

That's the thing though, you don't know what you're getting with Swindon.  It swings from really good to absolutely dire without much in between.

I can't remember saying it was the club's problem, just that I would have to think whether I'm going to make the outlay again next season.

I do think there will be a drop next season in sales though.  You've only got to look at the attendance tonight in comparison to the same game under Di Cano to see that people have lost interest. Unfortunately Cooper as manager will not draw in additional fans.

Actually I think it can become the clubs problem once popular consensus is met that its "too much" for the average fan.

There was a time I'd have paid anything to watch Town play, but I'd have a limit now, and its not a question of money but value for money. I used to play on a Saturday when I was younger, meaning limited games. I'm not sure I'd pay £27 to watch us play Wolves in division 3 (for example). If enough people feel the same way about season tickets, the club is fucked.

I don't think we are there yet, but its a personal line.

Completely spot on. Although I wonder if the season tickets are suffering a little in a general attitude of "fuck me that's expensive" generated by the matchday prices. Whereas they should seem more attractive the more expensive walk-up tickets are, that doesn't seem to be coming across. All the season tickets have done really is go back up to the pre-Fitton bargain prices era - I remember paying around 400 quid about 10 years ago. It's pay on the day that's got bloody silly

Agree there Paul.

I also think we are suffering a post Black/PDC slump. With talk of self sustainability it feels a bit like a return to the Wills years in terms of investment. It is of course the only option open, we haven't got a sugar daddy to pay for a promotion push so we have to do it to survive.

I guess some of those that came aboard when cheap tickets/investment came will vanish again :(

We are swindon,  when (apart from 92-93) has it been any different?

I'm sure in 03/04, we had a few good offers towards the second half of the season. Including 6 games for £90 or something like that.

We got on a run and were getting 9-10k during the run in to the playoffs.

The problem is that we get older and grumpier and a % drift away completely.

The reality is that this season is one of our best in the past 15 years.  So there have been plenty worse but your attitude towards it changes.

In the modern era, as things stand, we seem stuck at around 7k-8k for home crowds (away followings make it vary). Even under PDC, we were not pushing for the sort of crowds we think we shuold have been getting.

Unless there is real evidence that cheaper seats would cause a surge in demand, nobody without a wad of cash behind them is going to subsidise that.  And for all the grumpier old uns among us, youngsters will catch the bug in sufficient numbers to keep it ticking over.  The only time we hit sub this number was after about 10 years of shit (03-04 apart, and that was a half and half season so a lot of people never really got onboard).  The only time we have beaten the barrier of 10k was Premiership season and then we had a few years after where a good run could keep a few of them interested.  Has been the way since the 70's and quite frankly it takes something big to change it.

My point - a few quid will make people moan.  Some individuals will take a stand, some new ones will replace them and it will generally keep plodding along so long as we don't have a really long period of complete shitness.

Strangely enough,  I'll probably be coming back to the CG very soon.

This is strange, as you haven't asked whether you should come back or not yet, which suggests a previously unseen decisiveness. In advance of the expected request, my advice would be not to bother, you can see from the posts on here tonight how upset people get....even Paul Davis is making spelling mistakes.

I'm used to shit reg, it will be a glorious return. Well,  I'll sit in the DRS and grumble like a few of the tossers around me.

Fair enough as long as you know what you're letting yourself in for...

when did anyone support a team because it's good?

Exactly.

Uh, the legions of plastic manure and man shitty fans might disagree with that reasoning.

Did anyone else read this bit of the FAQs and find it utterly baffling?
Eh? Am I missing something here or has that got precisely bugger all to do with the price of fish?

Is this about the Play-off Final?

I assumed so, but still couldn't see why that should make any difference to having to renew season tickets before then? It just seemed like a shit excuse which palpably wasn't the rationale. Which slightly made me a bit nervous then that there's another reason and it's one we won't like.

For the record I assume the real reason is a cashflow thing but as I've said elsewhere the problem with getting the bulk of your annual revenue in before the end of the season is that it's supposed to last you over the summer and well into the new season. The earlier you get it in, the earlier it runs out, and the longer period you spend with only matchday revenues coming in. And thanks to Jed and Co selling off the catering they're going to be less next season too. So the sooner we run into a shortfall. We could start to see how deep Mr Power's pockets are fairly early on next season.

When I first started going back in the early 60's, the club had a simple expedient for getting through the summer cash shortage.....it didn't pay the players; after all they weren't working.  Some would get a seasonal job, for example Don Rogers, worked in Smith's the Undertaker, near the Magic Roundabout.  Ernie Hunt and Mike Summerbee, helped dig graves in Radnor  Street.  At other clubs, there were players who played cricket for a county.....we should go back to that system.

That's quite a good idea. Any suggestions for work that our current players could do?

Ranger - Parole Officer

Gladwin - roundabout

Pritchard - Minion at a Theme Park

(http://ts3.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4676988690629799&w=225&h=152&c=7&rs=1&pid=1.7)

Troy - Bouncer at a titty bar.

plastics, like dead men, dont need season tickets

Did you offer a shoulder, when you gently told her?

Ryan Mason - Crash Test Dummy.

maybe Im forward,maybe Im morbid!

£27 for Swindon Town vs. Oxford United next season.

Face it, it's a big ol' possibility... and it's not because we're going down.

Best start revving up for a pathetic keyboard warrior testosterone fest and some children having fights in the street then.

Joy.

Now I'm no hotelier. I just thought I'd tell yer.

It'll be fine,  the Internet wasn't around in the 80's.

Long way to go before they come up and join us. Still more than enough time for them to fuck it up yet, starting tonight by the looks of things.

Nice one Newport and of course Swindon boy, Zebroski.

I will probably renew....

Football is the glue for a day out with the boys......good job it's not chocolate as Jutty would eat it.

The deadlines were exactly the same last year and the year before that.