I had a season ticket for the last two years because it was cheap and now I don't have one. I've only been to two games this year, I just don't enjoy going as much as I used to do and can find more cost effective ways to spend my leisure time.

My friends who would come to occasional games with me in their teenage years would never go to matches now because of the cost, and that for the same price they could sit in the pub all Sunday afternoon having a few pints and watching the football on the television... plus now more and more people around my age group are starting families, getting mortgages etc so time / money aren't as freely available... so there is a need to attract a new generation.

I think something like the membership scheme might help, well you pay an upfront membership fee and then get cheap admission to games / offers etc - it'd take away the financial commitment of buying a season ticket (don't Bradford City do something like this?). Another one might be where you pay quite a bit of money for a season ticket but then get money back for attending - I'm sure Walsall FC are doing this for junior tickets.

I've no idea where RL / the Bulls can position themselves nowadays. Attracting a younger generation of fans not only has to compete with other leisure interests but the fact that Bradford has one of the country's highest youth unemployment rates. Generally disposable income left for leisure activities is shrinking, so people would be more unlikely to pay £20 to watch a game of RL... and finally the general perception of RL needs to improve against other sports. Any marketing experts in the house?

Good point about the lack of disposable income for younger supporters. The club need to be imaginative here to bring in a new generation of fans. Time for Kate Hardcastle to show what all the publicity is about.

The half-price with a NUS card is a good start.

What about some tickets for small groups of games? They could be targetted at schoolkids with the caveat that they bring an adult. 1st game would be free. Then subsequent games the price goes up by £5 a game. We need to get people hooked but they need tempting through the gates. It's harder than ever to get the crowds in so it may mean a short term loss.

I think giving free season tickets to kids at junior clubs would be a good idea. Give them up to about 10 years old. If they've got a free season ticket, they will want to use it and get to plenty of games, unfortunately they probably weren't be able to go without their patents taking them and paying. This is where they club gets it's money, while keeping the juniors involved.

Maybe though we are where we are, and maybe you just can't get a significant gate increase, choose wht you do, without either spending more than the revenue increase on marketing, or else going back to silly prices.

Maybe there just aren't the thousands of extra people out there who are able to be persuaded to come week in week out. I think that's about it, in a nutshell.

I think if the club is working for the medium to long term, i.e. throwing resources at finding any way you can to encourage kids to come back, thus with parents, and aim at recreating the Bulls family we once had, then that is probably the way to go, but times are hard, and as has been said already, many young kids are much more interested in communicating with their little virtual world and have little inclination to bother with the real world.

This year, ANY kid under 11 can have a FREE season ticket, and I'm not quite sure, if that doesn't attract plenty of young 'uns, what else they can do. Pay kids to come? I expect the answer is that free or not, you need to persuade the corresponding adults to take them and that isn't happening like it once did.

There are even those committed enough to bother browsing RAB who yet say that they pick and choose, or don't go at all. If people with that level of club connection can't be persauded then what else can they do?

To those who are of that reluctance - what WOULD encourage you to start paying regularly again? (Serious question). I expect that if the Bulls became seriously good again, the "glory hunters" (and I have NOTHING against them at all - my firm view has always been that nobody has any obligation whatsoever to spend their own time and money anywhere except their choice) will be back in reasonable numbers - but that is the arch chicken and egg situation since it is hard-to-impossible to get to those heights without spending the money on the players and so again you would question whether economically that would be working. Yes, 10-12K crowds, but any more money coming in NET??

As for chairmen, such as Caisley, berating the citizens for not supporting their club, that's probably the most counter-productive and irritating thing any chairman could ever do. For one, it won't get one single person extra through the gate - so what is the fookin point? For another, why would even an understandably peeved chairman think that if Fred Bloggs isn't coming despite a great team, good atmosphere, succesful results etc., yet he might come if he gets a bollocking in the press? The chairman may [ifeel[/i that way, but if he [isays[/i it, then he is truly a moron.

Finally, those who are going can, in my view, be easily the best marketing we have at the moment. Persudae friends and family to go. If YOU can't sell it, what chance has expensive ads in the media? I would suggest none. You shouldn't be surprised that people are now in a negative mindset about spending what is a lot of money in choosing to re-form an attachment/association with the Bulls. We that go, and can vouch for what a great time we now all hav,e and how well the team is doing are the converted. But those who stopped going will only come round very gradually, and only if the progress continues. I don't care how much you spent on marketing, I can't see it would make any real net cash difference.

Although I still go:
i) I am fed up with seeing games ruined by poor refs, both games we have woon and lost (and please don't say we wouldn't have a game without them)
ii)Last year left a very bad taste in the mouth - all the main players have drifted away and we still don't know what went on.

TBH, looking round at the crowds this year, they don't look physically any bigger than they have for the last 2 years. IMO if you actually counted the people through the gates, you'd have similar numbers to what we're getting now.

Yes, I know the attendances for the last two years have been given as over 10k, but that's taking into account all those cheap season tickets. Trouble is, I don't think all those 10k showed up every week. Which is probably a large part of the reason we ended up in the mess we did as it's likely the board were hoping to make up the short-fall from the ticket sales from concession sales (food, drink, etc) and as people were picking and choosing which games to attend that plan sort of fell on it's backside.

What about a season ticket scheme that rewards loyalty?
Something like:
Attend all 13 league games - 20% off next years season ticket (could be graded - 12 games 10%, 11 games 5%).
Challenge Cup games 2% off for each game attended.
Play off games 5% off for each game.
Friendlies 2%
And so on. I think it would encourage people to attend more games and spend money while they are there.

Sorry, but IMO in practice a very poor idea mate, once you think it through.

Some of us have to work sometimes on matchdays. Or even, heaven forbid, manage to take a holiday. Or maybe fall ill. Or close family members do. Or have domestic emergencies. Or whatever else. Or have to accommodate partner's or otehr family commitments.

That does not make such people any less loyal fans.

Can see where you are coming from, but IMO would be highly counter-productive as would probably pìss off as many loyal fans as it might incentivise. It certainly would me.

Certainly a difficult question with no easy answers, so interesting to see the ideas

As Adey says even with a season ticket there will be reasons you cannot get to all the home games, and I have to be honest and say the games I make a real effort to see are the Leeds Derby, and Saints, Wigan and Wolves because by and large they play good football and you get a good feeling if you get some points from them - sorry if I have offended someone there. We have 3 of these games still to come this season which will hopefully push up the average gate, and the Saints game was messed about which probably cost a few thousand bodies on the gate.

However if we can say that at 7500 attendances are at base level - fingers crossed - and the majority of the club's main costs are fixed - then any additional marginal income you can generate has to help. My thoughts - and some of these might already be in place would be a) to target the younger supporters, and b) put some extra incentives in place to bring back some of the fans who have either lost some interest or are finding their incomes squeezed. So:
1) free season tickets for youth players registered at clubs in the area.
2) £2 tickets for school age children
3) A £2 UB40 ticket
4) If you buy a £20 day ticket you get a voucher for a pint/burger.
5) Ticket deals for away fans made available through their clubs.
6) More deals like the £18 lunch in the coral for the Salford game, with say a family of 4 meal and game ticket
7) A five games for £50 mini season ticket


Tickets through schools - maybe with a family bundle free - as you would hope at least some might enjoy the experience and come back as paying customers.
9) Ban television - OK I know that one is a bit radical:)

I think this sort of thing has some legs.

My circumstances now mean I struggle to commit to every home game (much as I'd like to).

I'd definitely look at a 5/6/7/8/9/10 game ticket and pick the ones I came to.

Flexibility is the key for many fans now - especially given cost and distance many travel.

The other one is tying this into away games; though I appreciate this requires buy in from all other clubs.

For example; The ideal for me would be a 20 game season ticket that allows me to attend home / away / cup / play off (excluding finals) games of my choice.

Wasn't there some kind of deal for reduced season tickets? Or was that under the [iAncien Régime[/i? Can't see it on the site at the moment.

I think under that system it was something where they came in groups, i.e the games were divided up by someone at the club and you then bought a ticket for that predetermined group of fixtures.

There's several ways you can do it:

A) Divide games amongst the top drawer fixtures (Wigan, Leeds, Warrington, etc)
B) A little from column A and a little from column B. Half the top drawer/ half bottom drawer games on each ticket.
C) Let the punter nominate the games, and then they're tied to those games
D) A ticket with seven games on it. The punter turns up, the amount of games on the ticket gets decremented by one.

Curious to see how much you could do realistically with the current infrastructure though.

I assume that the software in place already supports a lot of this, because I imagine the cards people got were similar to the season tickets. Punter turns up, bar code reader checks back with base if the person is allowed in or not, and then they get a yes or no answer back.

I imagine everyone wants option D because of the flexibility, or would accept option C.

The trouble with that is people are numpties. They will forget which games they have access to, how many games they have left, and so on. They will forget often and they will be there in numbers trying to get in at the last minute when you want the queue to be flowing.

If it's a predetermined list of games made by someone else then you can mark the card as Ticket Type A, or Ticket Type B, or whatever it actually is. You can have something on the website that lists which games Ticket Type A and Ticket Type B holders get access to, and you can also mention it in everything that markets the game. Also important is that the person on the turnstile has a simple thing to say. "Sorry sir / madam, you have the wrong type of ticket for this game. This is an A game and you have a B ticket. Full details are available on the website." Or you might even have a leaflet handy you can give them. That's it, problem dealt with. Next.

If the games the tickets cover aren't predetermined, and there's a whole bunch of flexibility tied into it, then the reason the bar code scanner and the thing it's connected to said no aren't necessarily clear. Is there a screen in there giving feed back to the person on the turnstile? If there isn't that's a big investment, and probably some development time to make it feasible. Do you even want the turnstile operator explaining what games the customer can get into or not? What if there's a huge queue behind them, it's two minutes to kick off and the punter is being a c0ck?

Or do you send them round to the ticket office to see what the problem is there?

Technology wise I bet it's entirely possible, with maybe a little development and investment. Procedurally I bet it's a nightmare.

I'm about to change the email service from under the feet of 40,000+ people. I did it before a little under two years ago. Thinking about the consequences even the smallest of actions can have on support staff is something I get to deal with a lot. Email services don't kick off in five minutes time though, and games do.

Not saying it's impossible, just that it's not as easy as you might think.