ARCHIVE: Will They Ever Learn?
White Love’s HGR rolls out yet another attack on the club for failing to reduce admission costs for the Coca Cola Cup games against Leyton Orient and Wimbledon.
Once again Bolton Wanderers Football Club have shot theirself in the foot by keeping prices at the top level for ‘mediocre’ games. Like last season, the season before and the season before that, a cold midweek cup tie at home attracted a very piss poor crowd. Not that the weather or the fact it was midweek played a huge part, no it was simply because fans, after shelling out a couple of hundred quid for a season ticket don’t want to pay full whack for an early round cup match. Especially when the team has done the business in the first leg away from home and the tie is all but settled.
When I and a mate separately phoned the club the day before the Orient match at the Reebok we were told in differing tones that the club would be charging full league match prices. My mate says that the person on the other end of the phone reacted in a tone of “well what did you expect?”. Almost saying to him, you can’t for one minute think that the club is going to let you through the turnstiles for a reduced admission you cheeky scoundrel!!
And so just 6,500 turned up for a game that had little atmosphere. The only thing that stopped it from totally resembling a reserve match was the noise made from the travelling Orient fans and their drum. Meanwhile, down the road in Derbyshire, the Rams had managed to attract 18,000 for a similarly dismal tie with Southend... so how did they manage that?
“Kids should be allowed in for a quid, season ticket holders for a fiver, and others for a couple of quid more.”
My guess is that they must have reduced admission, something Bolton Wanderers cannot seem to grasp. Kids should be allowed in for a quid, season ticket holders for a fiver, and others for a couple of quid more. The old argument of letting in kids cheap is that of the potential for new fans in the future. Grab the little buggers and get them supporting Bolton before the Red Filth cast their evil net over them. For season ticket holders, well the old argument for them is that they should be rewarded in future matches, big games where tickets are sparse (ie. attendance at the Orient game = first in line for Old Trafford/Ewood Park tickets). The seven quid mob may well be fans who are unemployed and unable to afford tickets for league matches, and that isn’t something anyone should scoff at, because I for one know of people who simply cannot afford to watch Bolton in the Premiership anymore, straight up.
The club will moan that they are losing revenue, and yet again the fans will state that they can still fleece us with parking fees, burgers, pies, pints and match programmes.
Then there comes the argument for the players. You can’t tell me that they enjoyed playing in front of a three-quarter-empty stadium, when the potential was there for at least a 15,000 crowd?
The exact same can almost be said for the Wimbledon game that followed in the Coca Cola Cup at the Reebok. Okay, it was always going to attract a bigger crowd than the Orient game, but still, it was far short of being a sell out. For that game I may not suggest the above prices I mentioned, but possibly a fiver for kids and a tenner for adults, this would have been better than having 15,000 empty seats.
Other ideas would be to allow season ticket holders drastically reduced prices for their own seats or slightly reduced prices for better seats. For instance your £16 East Stand Lower seat could be snapped up for, in the case of the Wimbledon game, £8. Or you can have the option to upgrade to the Upper tier for £12 (instead of the full price £18). For those in the upper tier, well they should be offered their own seats for £10 and be able to downgrade for £8. The ends would also have drastically reduced price seats that could also be upgraded and downgraded.
There’s tons of ideas and schemes already in operation at other clubs whilst I doubt there’s any worse than the one we currently use... full price for everyone for every game... WHAT A JOKE!
First appeared in White Love Issue 18, October 1998.