Ask the club to move your season ticket seat so you can sit by your friend.
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It will be either be a mixture of reasons or something that is particular to Walsall football club or Walsall borough. Most of the reasons people come up with could easily be attributed to any club and any town/city. I’m sure a lot of Liverpool, Arsenal or Man Utd fans struggle to be able to afford to pay the prices their clubs charge. The fans of Chesterfield, Stockport,Bradford or Notts county aren’t richer than Walsall fans and they get larger gates.
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I think it was @P.T that posted a very interesting post, maybe somewhere on this thread, showing comparisons on attendances when we were last at step 3, the League One attendances now and our general attendances in comparison.
That post illustrated how we would now comfortably be one of the poorer supported sides in League One which shocked me. All but 4 clubs are pulling averages of over 6k, with 12 clubs pulling in 9k+. If it wasn’t for the bank rolled former non league minnows, we would be even further down that table.
In the last decade, modern football has passed us by, as so many of us campaigned about and no doubt bored a lot of our fellow supporters with at times. But, this is the result. So many issues for so many years - lets not waste time going over old ground. There are too many clubs to name that pulled in significantly less than us in the 90s that now boast bigger averages, in some cases 5 figure averages. They have built on momentum and ridden the wave of modern football. All while we went the other way
Trivela are playing 10+ years of catch up, and its going to take time.
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Guessing he did two games in one day with Coventry kicking off late.
Tough but not impossible. Would need to be back in Walsall town centre by about 2.45pm and then the 997 up to Dales Lane takes about ten minutes.
Can’t look back, have to look forward.
The Bonser strangulation which started around 15-20 years ago when the story behind his purchase of the club, ground and stadium finally got the online publicity it deserved, and with the Lee championship capitulation, then the Dan/Fox scandal, and the steady decline and the ‘stuck in a rut’ management with a disinterested owner looking only at his retirement package has caused an almost generational disengagement between club and fans, so our new saviours need to cast the net wider than most, seeking new blood to replace those who slunk off to Luton, Bournemouth and Rotherham, or Rushall, Solihull, Villa, etc.
Interesting times, and I’m sure there’s ideas out there. If @Southwestern can drop some decent ideas on the digital equivalent of the back of a fag packet I am certain the leadership (not management, there’s a difference) team have got this in hand.
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Also so many of our matches are on Sky + which must also make a difference if money is tight.
Also open up concession tickets to the whole of the stands not just certain blocks as it is now. This would allow older folk to have a better choice of seat.
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And until recently 3 o’clock kick offs were unavailable to view now anything can be seen live .
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Every club in the division has matches on Sky, so that does not explain why Walsall has not improved on its previous position of mid-table mediocrity in the attendance league. We are in the bottom half of fourth division when it comes to attendances.
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I find it difficult sometimes to understand why we have a core base so different to teams like Stockport (purely as a topical example which is relatively accurate) - every way I look at it in terms of area, population, demographics (even social/economic) we probably should, in all honesty, have bigger crowds…
Walsall is one of the largest towns in England (by population) and whilst we have loads of local competition from so called bigger clubs, the wider conurbation could and should generate bigger crowds - I say this because one major factor for all these big PL clubs (Utd, City, Liverpool, Villa etc) is that as well having large local support (obviously) most of them also have they large and widely spread fan bases…
There are waiting lists for ST at most larger PL clubs and I think Villa are no different so there are folk out there that are fair game for a targeted approach if the club took on the challenge…
I know that every club worries about alienating their existing STH who have invested in the club early doors but at times (and certainly in our situation) I think that needs to be put to one side to ensure a proper and structured growth strategy for new, future STH is actively deployed…
I know sometimes comparisons aren’t entirely helpful but Bradford recognised many years ago that to compete with Leeds for its fan base it needed a clear and long-term strategy to increase STH memberships - I haven’t checked but last time I looked, they still had the lowest ST price structure in all of the professional football league.
I’ll stop writing now but just a thought….
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I know it annoys some fans but I think we really need to go hard on the kids/community ticket give aways. Traditionally we always have a shocker on the pitch when we run one of these days but if you couple them with a side that is performing well you have a better chance or reeling in fresh blood.
Let’s face it, supporting WFC has been bloody hard for the last decade or so and it takes a special kid to want to wear a Walsall shirt in a sea of Villa and Wolves. However if we can just ‘turn the heads’ of a few it has a drip drip effect, they start bring mates with them because its a great match day experience and then you get the ‘flywheel effect’
I do k now from one of the yellow ribbon podcasts there is a limit on the number of community days but we need to max them out. End of the day if we can fill 1500 seats that would have been empty and they are buying food/drink/programs then its got to be worth it.
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Agree Zaddler - although it’s bloody irritating that these restrictions are put on the scope of these community based ticketing incentives… Another football over protecting the big guys problem I’m afraid….
I actually think that if there were less strict restrictions, Trivela is the type of owner that would 100% embrace much more of it to not only get bums on seats but also to enhance and support their community approach to ownership…
Great post. It is indeed a bit of a mystery.
Other clubs seem to attract more of a “it matters, but it doesn’t matter that much” element to their fanbase. What I mean by that is that our away support is,in comparison to others, a huge percentage of our home support. Bit like Grimsby. But others like Notts County, Doncaster, Shrewsbury, Rotherham travel as well as cheap wine.
We took over 50% of our home support to Vale. That’s phenomenal. I’m sure not even our mossiv neighbours would get close. Would Villa flog 27,000 tickets for Forest away? I seriously doubt it.
What people like Donny, Rotherham et al have done is make going to the match part of a few extra thousand people’s routine. They somehow got them into the habit. They rode the wave of ground moves despite, especially in Donny’s case,those grounds being in less convenient locations.
Ben Sadler needs to be seriously looking into how they did that. I bet it’s a hardworking mixture of marketing, convenience (around travel), pricing, community reach out and matchday experience.
And broken record time, part of the matchday experience is being able to see the match. We have three sides of the ground where obstructed views hugely outnumber unobstructed views. In 2025 at 2025 prices that’s a problem. One we can’t just brush under the carpet.
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You mention obstructed views. Even our luckiest of lucky fans that are fortunate enough to sample the NioFO viewing gallery, get to sit behind the biggest slab of iron you have ever seen in your entire life. The slab isn’t slightly to the left or slightly to the right, no it’s planted with symmetric perfection straight down the middle. Utter joke really. Those stanchions are a constant reminder of the previous regimes f u mentality to the clubs support. Hated them from day one.
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Albion are averaging 25000 out of a capacity of 26500. Villa, blues and Wolves are sold out.
So if you live in the West Midlands and want to watch league football, Walsall is really your only choice.
The potential to increase crowds is there.
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Whilst I agree with the restricted views feeling, there are plenty of seats in the Poundland upper free on a matchday, so am not sure it’s the primary problem at the moment.
It is a problem. The ground is unappealing.
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With the community initiatives they should look at giving the community section a block of 200-300 for every game and targeting different schools for different games instead of having 1500 at a couple of games a year.
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What in the last 25-30 years of the Bescot era points to this potential being here ?
Promotions under Nicholl nope
9000 fans to Man United under Jan nope
2 promotions under Ray including beating all the locals and taking 16k to the millennium nope
A period in the championship, Merson signing, an effort to keep prices down nope
Dickie Dosh league title nope
Revival under Smith which took 30k plus to Wembley nope
Record breaking run of wins and promise of a title sewn up early ! nope
So where is the potential. Absolutely deluded.
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