IT'S NICHE TO KNOW YOU'RE HERE PART II 17-11-05

By Andy Morgan
November 17 2005

And so leading on from part one, we can now move back to the subject of ticket sales. The reason why the attendance for the Dnipro match was low was partly due to the club - in conjunction with the media......

....failing to sell the match to local supporters but it also relates to the ticketing policies of the club.

Now much has been said about the decision to keep the ticket prices at their standard rates for a bunch of no-name Ukrainians in a group stage match of the UEFA Cup. A group stage that fosters the idea of nothing-matches rather than generates any interest or indeed any extra revenue incidentally.

Yes the club didn’t sell the tie to the public but when season tickets cost around £400 then this is something they are going to HAVE to do. Football is a commercial enterprise and the club can’t have their cake and eat it, i.e. they can’t take our money at the till in the club shop or through season ticket sales and then expect us to come back for more just because it is the club we support or because it’s the UEFA Cup.

This to me is milking our loyalty- they created this divide between fan and club and thus the suspicion that surrounds it- and if they want us to come and support the team then the situation they’ve created for themselves is one in which they will have to employ a bit more effort.


Thus they HAVE to tell us WHY we should come, where the value for money is for the fans, and not just expect us just to turn up and pay £25 for the privilege. This is the distance I believe that exists between club and fan and one that is of their own making. And it’s not just Middlesbrough but nearly all clubs in the top two divisions that have created this.

Reduce the tickets to £10 and I am sure you would get more than two and a half times the number of fans there, resulting in a greater profit- and that doesn’t factor in additional money spent on programmes and refreshments. Or bring a kid for a fiver, or other promotional offers of that kind.

It worked for Sunderland in the Carling Cup match against Arsenal- there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work for us. If football is the commercial venture it so patently now is then MFC should be viewed like another company offering a service. One that occasionally needs to ply the customer with special offers in order to guarantee a sale.

And what is more frustrating is that the club sort of knows this. The full admission price for the Dnipro game makes even less sense when the comments of Keith Lamb of 1 November are considered. That Boro are in the competition for reasons of prestigue rather than profit. To me, this view seems contrary to the club's ticketing policy.

If we were going for prestigue then wouldn’t there be more prestigue in a full house than in a load of empty seats? And if profit was not an issue then why not implement this policy? So how can these contrary views be explained? A lack of communication within the club? Or maybe a lack of anyone with a sound knowledge of economics?

Either way you’ve got to wonder at the wisdom of the club at a time when it was being pilloried by the fans for its detachment- the Dnipro game was a perfect opportunity to show the fans that it did care about them and was committed to its grass roots support. Unforutnately it failed to take that opportunity and this is why I question how much they value our support because if MFC did care about its grass roots then it would have implamented a policy of kids in for a fiver, or offer other promotions such as student discounts - a goldmine of opportunity with the ever-expanding University in Middlesbrough - or discounted tickets for frequent away supporters or a variety of other ideas I am sure they could come up with.

In recent times all of these have been sadly lacking in the rigid pricing structures of the club and it is no wonder, when Boro fans see Sunderland letting local kids in for discount prices or Bolton and Norwich offering significant student discounts, that the fans are starting to become disillusioned with the club.

The positive that can be gleened from this however is that it looks like the club is starting to appreciate the importance of discounts and offers in its ticket pricing policy. The discounted tickets for the Palace game are a good start (although £15/£17 an adult ticket for that game is still a little steep in my opinion) as is the policy of ‘bring kids for a fiver’ being implemented at both the Fulham and Palace games.

This will go some way to restoring the fans confidence in the club and, when combined with the concern the club has expressed for its fans in recent weeks, as Steve highlighted in last week’s column, the club appears to be moving in the right direction as he rightfully states. Whether this will last however is another concern and needs to be monitored.

Meanwhile the cynic would say that the discounted tickets for Fulham correspond to a match that not only involves one of the least mouth-watering teams in the league but one that is also on Sky and this would result in a reticence in people coming to the game should discounts not be made.

I would say that that is probably true, the fickle or economically squeezed fan - and it is those we are really targeting here, rather than the hardcore who would have bought season tickets anyway - would probably rather watch the game in a pub than spend 90 minutes in a freezing cold stand but the club appears to have done its research here and is doing its best to bring the crowds in.

Indeed in allowing fans to switch their seats for the game as well it is being especially accommodating and this can only be viewed as a good sign. The sad fact is that due to our recent successes we are on TV a lot more, and this will obviously result in some fans choosing to stay away and watch the game in the comfort of their own living rooms or the pub. Many people have Sky solely for the football and more people have Freeview where they can get ITV 2 and ITV 4, the channels the Boro’s European games have been shown on in recent weeks.

Furthermore, even if they don’t, the pubs in the vicinity would show the Boro match because the majority of fans live in the Boro catchment area. It is this that the club has to compete with in order to drag fans to the Riverside. And this will only get worse when the weather gets colder and wetter as this too will breed reticence.

So it’s encouraging that the club are doing something about it now in trying to attract fans back to the Riverside. Some say it is the quality of football that is important but I do not fully buy this as last season when we played some good football in the first four months, attendences did not noticably pick up.

No, the sad fact is that money is the key- it drives life and it now drives football and in an area that is, despite improving, still economically in the doldrums, perhaps it’s a little unfair to expect season ticket holders to shell out even more money for supplementary matches.

This too is exasperated in the number of fixtures we have, the games now spread even more thinly and thus maybe it is unfair to expect the attendences to be as high as some believe they should be. So considering this there is not a more appropriate time than now for the club to start implementing discounted price policies.

It has been too rigid for too long in its pricing structure and now its starting to feel the pinch with respect to attendences it has been forced into action. Yet in doing this it will not only start to bring the fans back to the club but the club will also benefit as well.

Maybe a new era is dawning in the age of Middlesbrough Football Club, one which brings the fans and club together to pull in the same direction. Because if we achieve this we can achieve anything and attain our goal of becoming an established European side. But at the moment, it’s finally reassuring to know that the club is finally paying attention to us.