The Kraken

Personally I think the whole catchment area discussion to be largely a waste of time. Particularly when people claim that getting to the PL (as opposed to being in the Championship) will suddenly mean that signicantly more fans from far away places will start to show an interest in coming to St. Mary's regularly. It's a talking point and no more. It means nothing. We'll attract more fans if we're successful. We'll attract less if we're not. The vast majority will come from within 20 miles or so of the stadium. Anything else is just minor statistics, as I've said especially so in comparison to our 180,000 customers on the database.

You've clearly quickly forgotten Neal Heaney, Stuart Ripley, Frankie Bennett and Neil McCann then. Oh, hang on, I think that might not be correct.....

No it won't, unless we choose to make a special exception. Premier League rules dictate home clubs must give 10% of the attendance or 3,000 tickets to the away side, whichever is lower. Saints figure has typically been 3,200. There is no rule for us to go above that, unless we choose to.

Let's be realistic. Places like Fareham, Locks Heath etc are obvious candidates for new fans who could go either way with their support. Expecting to steal all but a handful of fans from those within the city is an extreme hope. Pompey are in the same division we were just 2 short years ago, its not as if they've disappeared entirely. There's a small element of merit in some of the "catchment area" talk on here; there's also far too much pointless rhetoric. Our appeal as a club will grow as we gain more success in the top league, of course it will. But lets at least have some perspective; any fans we actually attract from the other end of the M27 will be negligible in the general scheme of things; especially in comparison with the fact that we already have 180,000 customers on the club database.

I'm very concerned that you still consider yourself humourous or credible.

Well what is the point then? Because I'm clearly missing it; other than if its to state that most SFC customers live fairly close to Southampton, fewer than that live 30 - 50 miles away, even fewer still live further away and some live really far. And some might choose to come and watch us play, once in a while, because Premier League football is such a massive draw. Is that it? Because genuinely, if not, then I don't know what point is being made.

The whole catchment area discussion is really quite bizarre. I was reading through an old thread yesterday and someone popped up to say that Liverpool's metroplitan area and catchment area was similar to ours, and they also have Everton to consider, so therefore we could be on an equal footing. It's quite astounding really.

Is the answer "ooh Terry Hurlock"? I haven't got the Guardian so I don't know what the clue is. I imagine I'm right, though.

I'll be perfectly honest; I've never heard anyone say they support Saints because Arsenal were full up. Our immediate catchment area is obvious; its good that we have no other club within 15 or 20 miles of us. As we get bigger we will likely attract more new fans from the likes of Fareham, Locks Heath, Ringwood, Winchester etc. Outside of 30 or 40 miles its negligible how many fans are going to gravitate towards us. Even north Hampshire we're massively up against the likes of Reading, QPR and the London sides. And a real pipe dream to imagine that significant numbers of fans from W.Sussex, East Devon and Surrey are going to look at Saints as the new Man City and gravitate towards us. Sorry, I don't buy that at all.

We already do this. At least towards the upper end of the scale. Regular ST prices now already go up to £780 for adult Premium seating in the Itchen. In fact the club have also brought out a new season ticket which allows access to one of the suites pre-game (on a pay basis) which comes in at over £1,000. So we have the more expensive STs already. Which, under your model, would unfortunately mean that we'd need to build a whole load of new seats just to price them cheaply. Unrealistic, I'd suggest.

At the very, very worst this should have been a community service sentence. Get him cleaning streets or something, a rap over the knuckles, a "don't be an aboslute weapon like that ever again". 3 years for making a rubbish and poorly timed joke on facebook. Lunacy.

That analogy has been suggested a few times before. There are some parallels of course, but the two situations are also very different. Pretty much all home games were sold out at the Dell, and those games sold out very, very quickly. The Dell also had a season ticket waiting list, which we don't now. Moving to a bigger stadium wasn't the issue, everyone knew we needed to do that. Moving to a 32K stadium proved a few people wrong on how big a stadium needed to be, and that was the clever part: accurately predicting what our new capacity should have been. It was a brave move to say that Stoneham's 25K was probably a mistake and we should aim for more. I don't tend to think the timescale will surprise me. Even if the club started planning now and put in applications etc, we're years away from a start. Reading have had plans for expansion since 2007 and done nothing with them. We haven't actually got formal plans yet; and I assume that reason to be because the club don't yet know what a realistic capacity of an extended stadium would yet be. And while they may have all the information from our previous time in the PL, I don't believe they are a hugely reliable benchmark. For a start the figures are 10 years old, and apart from our post FA Cup season (for which most games sold out) we had three seasons during which we didn't sell out the home allocation for a significant number of games. The vaguaries of the "Our future?" statement suggest to me that the club are laying down a challenge to the supporters. IMO we need to show at least 2, 3 maybe 4 seasons of continual sell-outs before the stadium expansion dream will become a reality. In the interim we can (and I hope we do) press on with formal plans, planning permission etc, but I think the go/no go decision is a few years away yet.

F*cking hell, I knew when I posted that you'd come back and point out it wasn't actually spot-on. To all intents and purposes it captures what the kit is like. And it did so 2 months ago; so it was a decent enough mock up.

Perhaps not, but photoshops CAN also be pretty much spot on. From here: http://www.epltalk.com/are-these-liverpools-home-away-and-third-shirts-for-the-2012-13-season-photo-41371 (Albeit they didn't get it for 2nd kit)

for tony lovecock

Eh?

My mate works for Umbro and sent me this little teaser of the home kit earlier; I think it looks pretty nice...

I'd suggest your son needs to give his "mate" a good slap and a talking to.

Lets also not forget that Boro finished 14th in the PL in the year they got to the UEFA cup final.

They are iImpressive achievements, but you really can't just judge on cup success. In 1996/97 Boro got to two cup finals and were relegated. Much more recently Birmingham won the League Cup and got relegated. Both of those seasons were considered a failure for their teams.

Boro's highest ever finish in the PL was 7th, which they achieved once. Their next best was 9th. Cups aside, their league record is hardly any better than ours. Fulham's highest ever is also 7th. The thing that distuingishes us are their Europa cup records; certainly not league form.

Not absolute c..p at all. 2001/02: We had 8 games under 31K, 5 under 30K. 2002/03: We had 6 games under 31K, 4 under 30k. 2003/04: Our most successful season, 1 game under 31K. 2004/05: We had 8 games under 31K, 5 under 30K. Considering the away end divider moved in comparison with how many fans the away team brought, those lower figures can be significantly explained by the home end consistently not selling out.

Yep. On moving to St Mary's we finished 12th, 8th and 11th in the first three seasons. If NA achieves that in his first 3 season I suspect he'll get a bit more praise than "I don't think it was that great".

I don't disagree with the notion of what you're saying; but I don't think increasing our crowds significantly is going to be as easy as some people think. Consider: at St. Mary's we finished as high as 8th in the PL, plus 11th and 12th prior to the relegation season. So we quickly established ourselves as a mid-upper level Premier League team before our sudden capitulation. And yet in our time in the top league, with those decent finishes, we still had quite a significant number of games which didn't sell out. At our peak 23,000 season ticket holders + away fans (probably an average of 2,000 per game?) and there were still a fair few games where we couldn't shift all the home tickets. I admire the optimism from Cortese, and its a great goal to have. But I think proving the need is going to be very difficult, and as much as I'd like it to happen the realist in me still suggests that while its eminently possible I still consider it more unlikely than not it will actually happen.

It's amazing how far we still are behind the rest of Europe. This report tells it all, its a year out of date but anyway: http://www.soccerbythenumbers.com/2011/02/why-england-loses-not-enough-qualified.html The ratio of FIFA qualified coaches to active players: Spain - 1:17 Italy - 1:48 France - 1:96 Germany - 1:150 Greece - 1:135 England - 1:812