Leave the roof off an upper tier and make it a sun deck. 
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What day would you plan for our sunny summers day this year? August the 21st 
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Rotherham are where this club was 20 years back. Not quite good enough for the championship (although think they have a good chance of stopping up this year) but always in the shake up to get promoted once back in league 1 so that up/down jeopardy in a season creates far more interest than just bumbling around mid table in whatever division.
Also leave the new spot for their ground. Easy 10 minute walk from the station/town centre so in a much better spot than Millmoor was. They did very well getting that plot secure.
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Global warming - we’ll be sunbathing in February before you know it. 
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We wouldn’t want anything to do with shady deals at Bescot now would we?
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We barely get 5,000 home fans atm, the thought that the ground needs expanding is laughable just because we are playing infront of our first full house since Chelsea.
Modernisation yes, expantion no, and also learning to deal and cope with 6,000 without food, drinks running out first.
Lets concetrate on trying to be a top 10 L1 side first.
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First capacity game since 2015 because it’s a very special game
Average attendance around half capacity
Walsall fans- we need more seats more more more!!!
Yes, and it will be a few years imho for us to get to top 10 L1 side. If we do get back to L1 it will be a struggle to stay there as others have discovered.
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Thanks for the information. I too had a former life in construction - playing SimCity 3000 as a kid - probably why I now enjoy squeezing our ground into any available plot on the map. As a Bentley kid, I remember going on adventures over that wasteland. It really was like landing on Mars or something, because at the time it wasn’t even covered with grass, but reddish rocks.
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Don’t agree.
I’ve dug out my attendances spreadsheet, and these are our averages going back 22 years averaged by season and calendar year. The green and red indicates increase/decrease versus the previous season/year:
Notice how this is the first time in over 20 years we have seen 3 years of consistent attendance growth.
Now, you could argue the reasons why that is - but it’s undeniably happening.
Personally I think the club made a mistake in 2004 by not continuing to modernise and increase capacity further. That previous season we’d just opened the Purple Stand as it was then and even with a then capacity of 11,300, we hit 70% average occupancy.
Obviously what happened in the subsequent seasons was a massive reduction, but the 03/04 season showed that the appetite was there if the club could only move with the times. The club didn’t, the situation with Bonser gradually worsened and we entered a period of stagnation. Oh how different it could have been.
That’s why we now need to recognise that a) football in general is on a bit of a resurgence and b) after 15 or more years of being dormant, WFC is starting to stir thanks to a take over and the appointment of Flynn.
We’d be fools not to capitalise.
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For those interested, here’s the top 10 attendances from the last 22 years:
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Think you just proved my point that expansion is not required at this moment in time.
None of thoes figures show we are in desperate need of expansion
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You have to capitalise on positivity, not look back and be negative. That’s why clubs stagnate, because they take your attitude.
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Yeah lets spend £5mill on expanding the ground to 15 or 18k when we barely get 5,000 home fans , pretty pointless and waste of money.
Even if we got promoted we would struggle to get 6,500 home fans.
Glad Steff is our CEO and not you.
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If we were to spend £5m, as you say, and at the same time increase attendances by a modest 2,000 a game - how long would it take for that work to pay for itself?
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Most of the fluctuations in the total gate will be down to variations in the away attendance, as bigger/smaller clubs came into our division. With the caveat that I mean post 2006 after the Dosh promotion.
Our actual home numbers have varied very little in that period, although we do seem to have a bit of uplift since covid.
However, as I said above improving the away end and facilities would possibly represent a relatively low cost investment for the increased potential revenues.
Build it and they will come. 
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All for capitalising on positivy, but expanding a stadium we don’t come close to filling on a regular basis doesn’t seem like the way to do it. You think that adding a load more empty seats to Bescot will bring in the masses?
Capitalise by investing in the team. Show the people of Walsall that their club actually has a genuine desire to progress on the pitch for the first time in 15 odd years.
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I think if done sensibly, it’s the way forward. No point adding 15,000 seats overnight, nor am I suggesting that, but there are areas of the ground that are massively behind the times (shocking for a stadium 35 years old), that need to be brought up to present standards.
Projects like (1) the already mentioned away end (which would relieve the pressure on bigger games and security costs) and (2) the complete renovation of facilities in the family stand with an increase in seating and (3) with removing stanchions, are much needed, comparatively inexpensive and would bring the ground up to where it needs to be.
A club needs room to grow - a couple of successful years and we could once again be knocking on the door of 7-8000 averages. At present, the ground cannot cope with that for various reasons, and after the initial peak, we’d see a decline as the club struggles to sustain operating at that level.
WFC needs a ground of around 15,000 (in fact I think that’s what Bescot was originally touted as being, I have a newspaper article somewhere) maybe a little more, and should comfortably be able to attract 6000.
Point I’m making is that the club missed a massive opportunity in the early 2000s, you could argue we missed one in the 80s too when we built Bescot, I’m just hoping we don’t make the same mistake again.
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I would ask for eveidence of where the 2,000 extra fans are coming from, we would have to go back 20 years for those numbers in the championship and even then we were not filling it (granted the capacity now is smaller).
Sorry but there is no justification in spending x- amount.
I would rather us spend the money updating the ground (i.e stansions, food outlets, bigger clubshop etc) and the training ground.
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