Oh sorry, forgot no club anywhere in any league has ever increased their attendances. Right oh. As you were.
Well?
Where is the evidance that as a Championship club WE would need a 15,000 capacity?
A, my evidence is from previous years when we were there,
B, having 4 bigger clubs nearby does not help.
C, Rotherham and Luton could play here without the need for expanding (the latter nearly a Premier League side last season).
As you so eloquently put it, as you were.
The attendance for the Stoke City match in 2002 was 6,391.Other than that, a great set of stats Phil!
Can’t argue with most of your points, but I just think it’s all a bit premature and based on one good run of form. People seem to be talking as if it’s nailed on that in a few years we’ll be competing in League 1 drawing in 7k crowds.
I just don’t see increasing the capacity of a stadium that could accommodate almost double our current attendances as anywhere near a top priority.
Man City is a 20 minute walk in to central Manchester.
Isn’t chesterfields classed as Town Based ?
Can’t really include the London based clubs
2 miles from town centre, off the A61.
Saltergate was walkable from the town centre but never a welcoming ground to visit.
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To be worth increasing our ground we will need to be in the premiership and the fans will then come mainly to watch the opposition like now vs Leicester.
We will only get 10k in championship vs a West Brom . Not worth upgrading the size imo got a long time
I think at this point it’s less about massive capacity expansion per se and more about bringing the facilities up to scratch. This in turn, given many ideas in here, would naturally increase the capacity a bit anyway.
It’s about future proofing rather than potentially getting to a point of bigger gates, struggling to deal with it and then losing people. Make the ground somewhere people like to return to. We’ve started a bit with the new bar in the lower.
It’s something this club hasn’t really done in decades. In fact, as the stats above show, we’re a club who somehow conspired to lose over 50% of its average gates in 7 years (2003-10) - off the back of the most successful period in the club’s history…
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I think this highlights something. A common defeatist thought is “we won’t fill the ground regularly even if we got to the Championship” which is based on the fact we couldn’t last time we were there.
But looking at this fixture alone, the attendance was worse than what we are getting now in League 2, so why wouldn’t we get better attendances if we were in the Championship now, on the back of a couple of quick promotions? 6,391 with 1,619 from Stoke. 4,772 home fans and Stoke didn’t even fill the away end, that’s unthinkable now for a fixture like this.
Football has moved on a lot since 2002. Generally attendances are higher, away followings are bigger, there are more bigger clubs now (in this sense, we’ve been left behind). If we were magically in the Championship this season, we’d easily be getting 8-10k every game, beating the 7,853 average from 2003-04 and needing to expand.
We obviously don’t need to prioritise it now, but we should be having the conversations now if we are serious about reaching the Championship ever again.
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Easy. Tell all those Villa fans on their season ticket waiting list to get some practice in by buying one at Walsall while they wait.
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C’mon that was from being in the Championship, including much larger away followings. 
Followed by not being very good post Dan and Fox fiasco…
Agreed. I’m certain that Trivela will have a plan of where they want us to be in 10 years and they will be considering the stadium as part of that. The club’s previously stated aim is to reach the Championship. If that happened, the stadium in its current form would be totally inadequate. At the very least, consideration needs to be given to incremental improvements to the ground, so that we’re in a good position if the club is successful. As Canadians, they’ll be used to skating to where the puck is going to be.
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Even with larger away followings we still didn’t capitalise on the success we’d had in the previous years and dropping to League One away followings still doesn’t account for all of the 50% loss. In 2010 we were treading water in the lower half of League One, better positionally than we were last season, where the gate was higher.
And the Fox and Dann fiasco is just an example of how the club helped cause that downturn in gates.
The first thing maybe would be to get rid of the stanchions, they look shite!
Then see how we do next season. If we get to an average of 8000 a season, expand. Otherwise dont bother. Spend money on the team.
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The average ‘home’ attendance for 2003/4 was 6,599 (away average was only 1,254).
That season, Stoke brought only 1,300 Forest 1,300 and Derby 1,500 for their matches. You could double those followings now and add on more home fans too. The ground would not be big enough.
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Could not agree more mate …. Need to be getting 7k home fans through the door every game before you consider expanding 
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Love this thread. Imagine that Dj doesn’t come back & we finish 14th, then have an indifferent summer & Flynn leaves for a League One side, we could be in the sh*t before we know it.
Improve the ground sure, but let’s not get carried away, get established in league one & then let’s revisit.
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No disrespect to our club and our increased support base which is fantastic . But as an example Stockport with the same size ground as ourselves they should be thinking of extending A sell out against us in the 3rd round . If that had been at bescot we may have struggled to get 6k.
Answering the original question no bigger yet we fill it once in a blue moon it would be a waste of money that’s needed on the pitch first in my opinion.
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Talking to a couple of Stockport fans in the Armoury before the cup game, that’s one way they managed to get more, especially younger, fans interested. Tickets for United or City were both expensive and difficult to get, so Stockport targeted frustrated fans of the bigger clubs. Seems to have worked.
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