Just an observation. If we did significantly increase attendances then we could potentially lose the intimate vibe that lots of our fans like in favour of the impersonal “fans don’t matter” one that lots of people despise in the Billy-big-bollox clubs like those in the EPL. And it would be even harder to get enough away tickets than it usually is for us (more Notts County situations), and possibly even for some home games too. The club would become more focussed on the needs of the parvenus and potential punters than those of the existing fan base.
Be careful what you wish for or we could end up having to mount our own “Make Walsall FC shit again” campaign.
Lovely Irish roofer chap knocked my door not long ago said one of my Tiles had slipped think he could have sorted them stanchions for the price of the scrap .wish I hadn’t swore at him and told him to do-one now .
Simon Inglis’s book Football Grounds of England I think mentions the additional cost to not have supports. It was either £250,000 or £450,000
I know very little about the building of Bescot other than what was in the Inglis book or what older posters have put on here over the years - but I do know the remediation / work to build on a sewage works as opposed to a normal brown or greenfield site. Will be way higher which will explain the comparison of costs.
I also remember the issues we had in the pitch the first few seasons when it was caked in sand. Wasn’t that put down to the “ground”
If we want to progress it isn’t just performance on the pitch that needs to improve as we go up the Leagues
If we want to go beyond league two and lower league one then we need to engage any potential fan and grow the base line support. It should be in the top 5 of priorities at the club and it should concern everyone who cares.
Mat Sadler and managers as good or better and our better players will eventually need to see progress in attendance which matches performance, that will unlock money for improvement in teams.
Ben Sadler and our players could be thinking… Any day now word will get out and our efforts on the pitch in the training ground will mobilise this town… we will have decent gates of a loud and passionate fan base… Oh actually attendance is near enough the same as when we were poor.
Id hope we could get better gates than Shrewsbury, Vale, Swindon. Make it an ambition or get ready to remain between lower league one and upper league two… Until we drop even further.
It is about all the things below
Price
Access and travel
Stadium (yes the view)
Performance
Catering and food, drink, customer service.
Atmosphere.
In the Championship the bottom 4 average attendances are from 16k - (11k Oxford + Luton). Average away gates to Plymouth / Sunderland as the least accessible clubs are 1.5k. Our target should be Oxford… And we should aim for that in 5 years!
If we don’t get a grip of this soon then we will stall and fail to progress and get left behind even further. Back to league two.
I have emailed my ideas of ticketing to the club, they listened to Flexi tickets and membership… let’s see what they think.
I genuinely enjoy supporting a lower league team too.
I like it that we’re very different to the other league clubs in the area.
I’m Walsall first and foremost but I’m also a football fan. And watching Walsall in the third division is a lot better than watching them in the fourth.
Trouble is, to sustain third division football these days you need to average around 8,000. We struggle to get 8,000 for lots of reasons but say if we did average 8,000 a fair proportion of those people wouldn’t be able to see substantial parts of the pitch. Which makes that sustainability even harder if not impossible.
If you sold season tickets in the family stand for half the price we probably still wouldn’t fill it.
We were growing by 500 - 800 ST sales a year after Bonser left up until this year. If we can reverse course on that decline, implement better facilities and maybe even remove the roof and replace it with a bloody fibre glass dome then we could get to about 6k ST within 5 years.
Wish we had a civil engineer or architect as a fan. Could do a contest!
