The Kraken

Mikee, I don't personally see the point of a bigger stadium if we have to rely upon away fans bringing 5,000 fans each time to get close to filling it. That's 2,000 more tickets than most other Prem sides allocate (and that we would have to make available). Also, I don't share your dropping below 30K, as it happened a few times before in the Prem. You just need to look at our League cup gates to ascertain how ambivalent fans can become to lesser ranked games. Also, I'm not sure how you say adding 8,000 seats would be low risk; it would cost in the order of £32M. That's what St. Mary's originally cost us. just assuming that the Liebherr estate are going to fund it from their pocket out of the goodness of their hearts is a bit short-sighted IMO; any ground improvement would IMO have to prove to be capable of back-paying the costs within a relatively short time-frame (I'm thinking 5 to 10 years).

MLG, you're pretty good with stats, apparently? Can you provide a percentage of how many games Saints sold out the home allocation when in the Premier League? You mention Newcastle selling out with 51K of 52K, we often had 30.5K out of 32.5K, so an extra 1K seems like a hell of a lot to put down to segregation. Without stats this whole thread is massively based on assumptions, and therefore a bit pointless.

Because people would day trip to us from Plymouth; simple. Blimey, this thread has become even more ridiculous than I thought possible.

A very high level of season tickets, close to or over capacity of home tickets. Match tickets going on sale and consistently selling out within hours. Huge demand (thousands) for tickets, possibly by ballotting for high demand games. That would be a start.

No, I'm completely avoiding your suppositions as they are irrelevant. The only relevant thing is what evidence there is to show we could sell more home tickets than capacity to justify a new stadium. You claim there is evidence. What you just suggested is not evidence, it is an assumption. I'll assume then that you have no evidence to back up your assumptions; which is the entire point. Mr. Cortese will wait to see such evidence, thankfully.

What proof is there that the demand was there to have sold, say, just an extra 100 home tickets?

That would mean admitting he is wrong, a skill he is incapable of. Besides which, MLG has no idea of the exact numbers required for segregation, nor an exact idea of how many games we sold out for. That is just the start of a massive black hole of information that he doesn't have, yet still persists in peddling this ridiculous nonsense. As I've said, thank God we don't have a chairman who is so naive.

You could feasibly ask "why does an average attendance of more than 2,000 seats below the capacity reflect evidence that we should build a bigger stadium"? But then we all know MLG is on a meltdown here and won't admit he's wrong. Even despite the fact that, were he actually correct, we would be building a bigger stadium now in order to make use of the revenues when we get to the Premier League. We're not doing that. We're not going to do that as soon as we get to the PL. Unfortunately, only MLG disagrees with that. Thankfully our chairman is a lot brighter and more realistic than our forum hero.

Maybe you could ask Nicola Cortese why he doesn't count it as evidence (and therefore why we're not currently building a bigger stadium in time for our promotion to the Premier League), and you might be getting close to the answer.

I'm still laughing at the thought of MLG justifying it to himself; incredible stuff! And then choosing to make it public! :lol:

Back when the stadium was built it was quoted as £1,000 per seat in the original design (so 32K seats was £32m) but that an additional tier of seats would cost £3,000 per seat. I would imagine the price to have significantly increased since then to around £4,000 or even £5,000 per seat. The current stadium allows for every stand except the Itchen to be increased; Northam and Chapel by 4,000 seats each, Kingsland by 8,000. So you're looking at arguable £16M to put in 4,000 extra seats. Or the cost of another St. Mary's to give us a 40K seater stadium.

Yes, absolutely. Which is why I keep stressing that we won't see a new ground for a long time yet, as the owners will want to see an awful lot of relevant empirical evidence, which we clearly currently don't have. I don't quite understand the need by some to try and fast-track that by plucking out spurious comparisons. I don't think anyone here would rule out the potential for getting better crowds in the future. How big, who knows? But answer this, if a new stadium had to be financed by supporters' donations, how many people here would be prepared to chip in from their own pocket based solely on the evidence we have to hand? That would be complete madness.

No, I would not argue that as there are no numbers to even begin suggesting that thousands of paying customers were locked out from a significant number of games. As I've said, we're riding high at the top of the league; comparisons with the last time we were in this league don't look good, depending which method of comparison you use it might be argued we're actually down on our last visits to the Championship. So, in that respect alone, league position might seem to have a negligible effect on crowd numbers. Has he said a 50K stadium is feasible? Has he really? I think you'll find he hasn't. What he has said is that a satdium expansion is a long, long way off and would have to be justified by actual evidence. so clearly he doesn't have that evidence already. Creating a new stadium only to fill it with free or vastly reduced tickets hardly seems like an exercise in good business sense to me. You build a new stadium to maximise profits, not as a ****-measuring competition and to massage a particular ego. And you see, there's what having no empirical evidence does for you; I can not remember very many of those games at all. When we've had these threads before it's been asked for people to post on here if they consistently missed out on tickets; hardly anyone spoke up to say they did. Look, I think there's little doubt that we'd sell more than 32K tickets for some games in the Premier League. But if it would only be an extra 1,000 tickets, and only for the bigger game, is it a financial reality and worth the effort? Mr Cortese has consistently stated that there are no limits on an enhanced stadium, but it would all have to backed up by him seeing evidence. It's a shame that a minority of people seem to want to bypass all that.

You've said it there yourself. IMAGINE what the interest could be. It's an emotional response to what might be, cherry picking stats from other clubs to try and paint a particular picture when in actual fact its completely debatable how relevant those stats are. Again, the questions you absolutely need to be able to answer are these: How many fans were getting turned away when we were in the Premier League? How many games were selling out "well in advance"? How long is "well in advance"? I'm pretty sure Mr. Cortese will only answer any desires for a bigger stadium when he has years of evidence to suggest we need one; I do not believe for a minute that we have that yet, and without answering those vital questions I do not believe that you have either.

How many fans were getting turned away when we were in the Premier League? How many games were selling out "well in advance"? How long is "well in advance"? These are the really important questions that you need to ask when trying to work out if we will need a bigger ground. And there are very few people who know the answer to those questions. At a guess, I would suggest (as Turkish says) that the extra number of people who wanted tickets for the games that did sell out was barely in the hundreds, and certainly not higher than a few thousand. But again, that's complete speculation on my behalf. Perhaps; but then competing at the top of this division is barely having a positive effect this year than since our last forays here (depending which comparisons you use some could argue we're worse off; we're certainly not hugely up on home fan numbers from last year in a division below, that is for sure). The only thing that we do know for sure is that Mr. Cortese has indicated an expanded stadium would only be on the cards when we're back in the Premier League and can demonstrate we absolutely positively need one. That is a long, long way away yet, even in his own words.

I don't think questioning when the flag will be displayed again is all that unreasonable (or moaning), but you clearly have a bee in your bonnet about it for some reason. And I don't think it constitues a great deal of effort to provide an answer to the leader of a fund-raising effort as to his numerous requests for information on it; especially as a sizeable amount of money was donated by fans.

Perhaps a poor choice of words from me; but still, undeniably poor to hear from JustMike that the club have now ceased any correspondence with him on the matter. I personally think the Memorial game is the right time to get the flag out; but that's not really the point being made here.

Being as I don't own it, I have no idea why you think they would just let me walk out with it.

Being as the club have simply ignored all requests for clarification from the fund-raising organiser, I'd feel less confident of that, if I'm honest.

Exactly right; the fact that a lot of people have donated a lot of money for ownership of something that the club have subsequently denied the return of doesn't reflect very well at all.

This. I was in the main stand, pretty much in line with the penalty area, and the dithering from Davis was awful. He took forever and a day to decide whether to come for the ball or not, and then when he finally did it was immediately clear it was the wrong decision. Stay back and Miller still had plenty to do; Davis made his mind up for him and gifted him an easy goal. But it would be silly to solely blame Davis; that we got caught out by a massive hoof from the goalkeeper was reminsicent of Sunday morning football.

Agree that de Ridder needs to start; I wouldn't play Fox LM though. I'd probably go with dropping Guly and having de Ridder on the right, see how he can link up with the Lambert connolly partnership. Guly and Lallana were very quiet last night, and neither of them is direct in the same way de Ridder is, I think having him and Lallana would give us some brilliant possible variations in play. Schneiderlin out, definitely, I thought he was dreadful last night.

I was in the corporate area in the main stand; the truth is somewhere in between. Cardiff made a fair bit of a racket at times but didn't keep the singing going for long spells. Saints also put up a good showing but, from the other side of the ground, I wouldn't say were very loud. It doesn't help that the main singing areas for home and away teams are at opposite ends of the ground.

Can't see that working. If anything we need a striker who is going to get in behind defences. Lambert often drops to get the ball to feet, or is used as an aerial outlet with diagonal balls in. We looked a lot more dangerous last night when de Ridder came on for Connolly as he was alot more direct and willing to both run at defenders and get in behind them. I'm also not convinced Fox would be a better left winger than de Ridder either.

To say he doesn't defend well is not accurate IMO. With the way we play, and being a full back behind Lallana, whoever plays out of Fox or Harding is going to look exposed at times. He didn't ever really look all that troubled defensively last night. As a choice out the two of them, I'd probably still go for Fox; just.