You’ve touched on it here , even during the so called glory years Bonser was ■■■■■■■ his customers off.
The gates during our time in the championship were disappointing, but I think even at that point 2/3k had already walked away not to return.
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This is it mate, and when you start taking it all into account, it all adds up? Say Bonser put 2k off over the years (probably more tbh), our ridiculous walk up puts off say, 500, then the dire football, 500. Say 300 are put off by poor service at the ground. Thats 3.3k gone. And the operations are literally doing nothing to top that funnel up again.
No way in this world are we as poorly supported as Crewe and Burton. Our away followings are as big as their home gates at times! But, we will be unless someone finally wakes up and takes the bull by the horns at the club. Not gonna happen mate.
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Our away followings are amazing, the Wembley following was amazing.
The town will come out if you give them good reason…
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We might not be as poorly supported as Crewe or Burton but that’s not what I’m saying I’m saying we are in those kind of clubs categories that we wouldn’t get many more fans in for various different reasons no matter what we do Crewe was a second tier club for a while we was Burton was Gates barely changed now think of lincoln if they was second tier Carlisle would be another one both clubs similar Gates to ourselves at lower level that would automatically increase Gates without much effort if they were to be successful at any point in the future
Season 2003/4 first game full house (because we were playing West Brom) and we won 4=1! Next home game against a well supported Stoke city (they had won their first 3 games and had just got a gate the previous week of 12,500 against wimbledon) what did we get for our home game? 9000. blooody pathetic we should have sold out.
People will not come and see Walsall however well we are doing.
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This is true and it’s nothing to do with the current regime or the previous one’s before it because having a quick check you have to go back to 1968 for us to average over 9,000 50 + year’s ago.
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Good point, Otis, 6,500 is the best we are likely to do based on our few years in the championship. I believe the idea of building the Purple/Floors to Go stand was to accommodate most of the home supporters and then give the away end and most of the Community stand when we played clubs with a big following. This is only a financial advantage when we are in the championship and only occasionally a financial advantage in League 1, say if we play Sunderland. In my time the people of Walsall have only come out in force to support the team in the cup, (Newcastle, Man Utd), big games, (Oldham to clinch promotion, Reading at the Millennium and the FL Trophy at Wembley) We have done well to survive in the shadows of Wolves, Villa and West Brom. The arrival of the Premier League made life more difficult for all lower league clubs. Parachute payments created another financial distortion… IMHO the club offers some good deals to regular supporters. The “one off” supporter seemingly pays a ridiculous price but the club can either offer season ticket deals and discounts to regulars or have a different pricing system to try and attract “floating supporters”. I’m not sure they exist anymore. These days most of us can only afford to watch one team, not like back in the day when supporters of local clubs used to come to Fellows Park when their team were away or hadn’t got a game. The club does offer free tickets to local school kids but we aways seem to lose those games…
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Well I have already clearly stated why this is.
In 1988 our home average attendance was 100 off Birmingham Cities. Brum got Karen Brady in as CEO, an award-winning businesswomen. We got Roy Whalley, a secondary school teacher. We would never have grown to the size of Blues, but your honestly telling me we would be still be ambling along as we are if we had a strong, focused, driven professional like that? There’s a reason business people like Brady do well. They know what they are doing. There’s a reason why nobody outside of Walsall FC have head of Whalley, Gamble or Mole (I was gonna say WS1, but most won’t have heard of them even there).
Saying people just won’t turn up to watch Walsall is crazy. You give them a reason if there isn’t one! So short-sighted. If Brady, or even Moxey had of been here when we had our run in the Championship, we would have had 10k every game. Fact. You grow on the field, you grow off the field, you don’t just scratch your head as to why 3k more people haven’t turned up.
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There’s always loads of interesting points when we start talking about gates and matchday experience on here. How much of this ever gets listened to and more importantly translated into improvements?? How many years now, have we been talking about soulless matchday experience, ticket prices, the ballache of casual matchday attendance, the lack of digital ticketing etc etc etc. In this day and age if your in a pub with a mate that’s going up and you fancy joining him you should be able to buy a ticket on your phone and breeze in at 2.59 pm.
There are clubs that are a pleasure to visit in and around our level, and some of them are out of town jobs. Northampton last season for example was a really cracking day where you didn’t really need anything that wasn’t provided around the ground, even Scunny has its merits. Accrington (a ground I first visited in the Unibond League on a Tuesday night with Whitley Bay), Rochdale, Orient…you get the feeling at these places that folks are taking pride and hence putting effort into trying to give you an enjoyeable experience in the hope that you will want to return.
And its not all about the football clubs themselves, Northampton a the case again. Some joined up thinking between the actual club and local businesess goes a long way. You get this all over, remember the welcome at Hartlepool?? You get similar up the road at Sunderland. We can’t even manage joined up thinking between the club and the Saddlers Club on the club’s own car-park!! It really does need sorting out, and in my opinion will never happen while the same stale incumbants remain in post.
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We have a quite unique problem, in so much that before the “golden age” of football attendance that most clubs have capitalised on (seemingly) we had more fans than we have now!!
So the initial problem is not so much floating fans as lapsed fans that no longer attend, and that would probably get us near to Pomlett’s miles away ambition of 5k that he sees as first base in his medium term plan.
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Karen Brady knew exactly what she wanted and there is no way she would have ever come to Walsall. Birmingham City have played in the top tier of English football for half of their existance. She knew it would be right for getting back to great things. Birmingham the second city in the UK with the southern half of that city steeped in potential support for the blues. She knew when to jump ship and head off to west ham too.
Walsall just doesn’t have that potential.
We wouldn’t have got 10,000 that would have been roughly a 50% increase on what we was getting"home" support wise we averaged about 7,500 in the championship with probably at least a average away following of 1,500. If anybody thinks we could get 10,000 home fans in they must be smoking crack or something that’s about 30% of what Aston Villa get and they are probably one of the best supported club’s in the UK we’ve also got them Dingles down the road now getting into europe and expanding the ground to 40,000 they’ll obviously be selling cheap tickets to fill that up in a couple of years ,
I’ve said before we need to do something dramatically different and knowing Walsall the town as I do and the people who would go it could only be £10 tickets pay on the gate we should just try it for a season if it works it works if still nobody turns up then the club can’t say they didn’t try
I agree, Karen Brady would never have came here. But what about the second, third or even fourth best? Why did we have to employ a secondary school teacher with the charm of a dirty tea towel in such an important position? Why not go for someone like Brady and try and at least make a splash - we don’t even cause a ripple in our dealings. Smallsall. In important roles now we have two individuals that are imo useless, but not taking that into account, they alienate 50% of our fanbase. Nothing good can ever come from those 2 with the history of bad feeling between them and supporters. You can take that to the bank.
We shoot ourselves in the foot operationally time and time and again. Its never been impressive since I first went in 1991, and the more I grow to understand about business, the worse it looks both now and historically. When I was looking at the CEO of Shrewsbury with jealousy a few years back I knew we were screwed.
I reckon if Ramsden’s take-over had happened, we would have seen 10k, no problem.
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Problem is, even if they did set the prices at £10, they’d do bugger all else - no marketing, no matchday improvements and let’s face it probably a poor cheap team to go with it - and wonder why people don’t come. A half-hearted “we tried”.
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Think the Conference impose the drop on clubs falling out of the league too.
In 2014, we played Shrewsbury in the FA Cup. On the same weekend, the Sunday, West Brom played Newcastle.
So I arranged for my missus and son to join me for a double header involving a stop over at my mam’s, train down then meet with the mobile loony bin of the booze bus back up to the North East, chucking our gear on’t sharra prior to the game.
Guru…who is the bloke that runs the booze buses and “sorts your match tickets out” rang me about a week before to inform me that he been involved in a scrap after the Leicester game a couple of weeks previous, officialdom had taken a dim view and he was therefore struggling to get his usual supply of tickets.
So as a precaution I registered with West Brom using my Mam’s address with a view to getting home tickets last minute if required. As it turned out this wasn’t necessary Guru came through and we all lived happily ever after apart from Walsall getting knocked out in a replay and the innocent diners of Wetherby having their evening meals ruined when 300 drunken geordies turned up just as they were perusing the sweet trolly.
The point is, to this day NEVER having spent a penny at West Brom I still get bombarded - almost daily - with emails from WBAFC offering me every ticket deal, club shop discount, seasonal event you name it. I’ve got a junk folder that is almost exclusively WBAFC and I’ve never even spent a penny with them.
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I don’t believe all that stuff matter’s anyway it’s just a convenient excuse and something for people to moan about .
It’s like when the same people who loved everything about Fellow’s Park moan about no hot water in the bogs fuckin hot water what are people doing having a shave at half time or something or refuse to sit anywhere other than the upper tier at Bescot.
The main issue I find at Bescot is the queues they are madness beer, food, tickets queues everywhere I’ve literally never witnessed that at any other ground with 4,000 people inside.
One other thing I find quite funny is most away fans at Bescot Iv spoken to always say how nice the ground is 
I’ve spoken to literally dozens of different fans of other clubs even at championship level and they are baffled when I tell them our fans hate the place.
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Football is a business now, so of course marketing matters its moved on quite a bit in recent times, its a business first and foremost - a very lucrative business if you play the game right. You do make some good points but some of your views do seem a good couple of decades out of date.
The problem is the people that run our club have similar views to you - that is thinking that before too much longer is going to see us in non league, overtaken by clubs that do market themselves, like Solihull. I would take their CEO tomorrow, bet they wouldn’t even come to us. When you think about where we have come from, its criminal.
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Boston springs to mind. Went in to administration 10 minutes before the end of the last match of the season when they were just about to be relegated out of league 2. The conference sent them straight through to conference north.
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Now you come to mention it, you could have had lathered up and had a lovely shave at Fellows Park utilising the steam off the cummunal ■■■■ trough as it met and hung in the cold air, it was Turkish bathesque! See… ahead of its time.
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