The Kraken

Is it, though? genuine question, as I don't know where the demarcations of footballing-income will be. For instance, could Man City simply buy out, for instance, Frankie & Benny's, re-name them "Blue Moon Restaurants", incoporate them under the umbrella of "Manchester City holdings" or whatever and then claim all profits as football income? Seems totally ridiculous, of course, but is it possible?

I think I'd actually prefer Redknapp to Stuart Pearce. Can't see why Jose would ever want the gig. Wenger would be the ideal candidate IMO, although the press would absolutely slaughter him for even the tiniest of failures.

I never leave early at the end, but always a few minutes before half time to get a half time beer. You get served immediately, and you can still see the pitch to keep an eye on the game. Plus when the screens down in the concourse are working you can keep an eye on those. A half-time beer is a necessary part of the day; f*ck queuing up for 15 minutes to then have to down it in 3 to then get back to your seat.

Redknapp will not get the England job. He just won't. The press will talk him up for it because they know he has so many skeltons in the closet that they could bring out, it will give them sensationalist headlines (and the increased sales numbers that go with them) for his whole tenure.

Being as St. Mary's has a UEFA 4 star rating, I don't think you can call our stadium "rubbish", even by comparison to any other stadium in the world. It's smaller than a lot of the great stadia, and does have a basic and common design. But it is not "rubbish" by any criteria.

I can't think of many stadiums that I'd prefer to ours. It's a flatpack standard design of course, but really, who cares? Bolton's & Huddersfield's look ok but they're smaller than ours, and I prefer the bowl arrangement we have. Arsenal's is a nice design but just a complete carbon copy of the Estadio da Luz, so hardly a stand out design. Other than those I can't think of any others that stand out; football stadiums are really just large, functional structures that house a huge pitch and thousands of people inside. The only one I can really think is a fantastic stadium is the Allianz Arena. But then how much did that cost? And what would it actually add to us (plus it would look a bit daft doing that to a 32K capacity ground).

I think you're barking up the wrong tree with that one.

Personally speaking (and I have nothing to back this up) I'd be surprised if Cortese didn't already have accurate outline costs for how much a stadium capacity increase would cost, and how long it would take. I imagine even basic preliminary plans may exists; if they didn't already when the stadium was built (it was built with future expansion in mind) then it really wouldn't take much to knock new plans up. Furthermore, I would also imagine he has an accurate idea of how much a new ground would cost, and a potential location or two identified. So I doubt he's been sitting on his hands waiting, especially given that he floated the potential of it all very early upon arrival at the club, and since.

Personally speaking, I'm not for one minute suggesting that a 40K stadium unreasonable. I don't think ANYONE is saying that we definitely won't need to move. What people are saying is this; there is currently no evidence, none at all, to suggest that we will definitely need a bigger stadium. There is absolutely certainly no evidence to support MLG's claims that we need a 50K stadium. Talk of a bigger stadium is massively premature; in Cortese's own words it is a long way away yet. Expanding the stadium to 36,000 would cost around £16M. Expanding to 40,000 would cost £32M. Those are massive sums of money, and Cortese won't just fritter cash away on them for a vanity exercise, he will want to be 100% definite that there is a real need for such an expansion. What I especially am saying is that there are a number of benchmarks which will need to be met before we talk about spending such vast sums, namely: A season ticket base up towards the home allocation capacity; All match tickets selling out within a few hours of going on sale. Potential ballotting of tickets for select games to see exactly how many fans above capacity would be prepared to regularly shell out for games. If those conditions are met then I'm sure Cortese will want to expand the stadium. But they will have to met first, we won't be building anything on the whimsical notions of irrelevant statistics and opinion.

Why bother? In Cortese's words himself, any expansion of the stadium is a long, long way down the road. Unlike MLG, Cortese will base his decision on seeing evidence for himself that extra capacity is required, rather than cobbling together irrelevant information from other places ina desperate attempt to provide a contrary stance. Any bet you have will likely take quite a few years yet to cash in, and if we don't expand, ever at all.

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.