north stamd pricing

Quote: McLaren_Field "Its a very dangerous path to walk down, we had it at Headingley several years ago with all sorts of special offers - David Howes was an instigator of several and I'm not being over-critical of him for it (and not just because I benefited), but the danger is that when £10 tickets are offered you get an initial surge of local publicity and maybe for the first few games after that you'll see an increase in home support.

But think it through - if (for the sake of argument) your regular price is £20 a ticket, then you've got to increase your sales by 100% just to stand still, you'll have 20,000 crowds every week but you still won't be making one penny more profit than you were before, in fact your overheads will rise with the cost of policing/stewarding those bigger crowds.

There's the argument that those 10,000 extra punters (and does anyone truly believe that those numbers are achievable) will spend money in the ground, but do you directly benefit from that income or does the SMC benefit ?

The real danger though is that the £10 becomes the norm and your management become complacent and frightened of what will happen when they scrap the deal - but if you continue it for too long then your season ticket holders are going to feel conned and they won't renew next year because its cheaper to pay on the gate and pick and choose your games.

The David Howes schemes didn't last for more than a couple of seasons and didn't bring us sustainable large crowds, the numbers have been falling ever since the deals finished (see also Bradford), and you can see the same thing now at the Leeds Carnegie Rugby Union games, they are getting crowds that rarely top 3000 and most of those in attendance will not have paid anything for their ticket or will have paid very little (£5 tickets are easily available), I have attended several RU games and never paid once.

Rugby just does not justify large scale ticket discounting.'"

Dont care about Leeds. Your ground isnt worth a fiver a game