The Kraken

I'll have a go Tel, although I feel I'm going over old ground here. Firstly, it's not a "pessimistic" view. I don't believe anyone is saying that we will never need to expand the ground. If people were indeed saying "we will never outgrow our current stadium", then that could probably be seen as pessismistic. However, the reality of the situation is that there is currently no evidence to suggest that at any point in our history, our present, or our near future we will consistently need an expanded stadium. Some posters on here are pointing to statistics from 8 years ago and suggesting that they already demonstrate a need for a bigger stadium. The evidence that needs to be shown for a bigger stadium are: A season-ticket level above 25K or 26K. A sell-out of home tickets for every single game. A large contingent of ticket applications after games have sold out. There is simply no arguing the fact that we have never filled those criteria. Could we in the future? It's completely hypothetical, and I don't think that anyone denies that for the very big games we could probably see crowds of at least 35K, and perhaps even higher. How high the crowd could go is, as I say, completely hypothetical. What isn't hypothetical is that, per the 3 main criteria I outlined above, se haven't yet come close to fulfilling them. Our season ticket sales peaked at (from memory) around 23K. We sold out the home allocation of a number of games, but there were also a considerable amount of games when we clearly didn't. And there is certainly no evidence to suggest that there were thousands of people who wanted to but couldn't get a ticket for the bigger games. In fact even people who live away/abroad have commented that they rarely failed to get a ticket for the bigger games, which perhaps suggests that our capacity may well just be about right. So until we sell out the ground every game over a consistent period of 3, 4 maybe 5 years, raise our season ticket level and see many people locked out of games, talk of the need for a bigger stadium is completely premature. But again, historical evidence shows that if we cannot sell out a 32,000 seater stadium for a very significant amount of games the need for a bigger stadium just for a handful of "bigger" games is questionable, given the massive financial outlay it would require. And I find the comparisons with climbing Everest completely bizarre.

The way I understand stadium expansion at St. Mary's is this; the Itchen stand cannot be redeveloped. The Northam and Chapel stands can have 4,000 extra seats added to them. the Kingsland can have 8,000 seats added. So the choices would be either add 4K behind one of the goals to go to 36K or add 8K on the side and go to 40K. I think this thread is rumbling on and perhaps some are missing each other's view point. I don't think anyone is predicting that we will never, ever need to consider a stadium capacity increase. 10, 20 years is a long time in football; we've all seen how our fortunes have dramatically changed in the past 8 years since we were flying high and at an FA Cup final. However, I think (or certainly what I was trying to convey) we and the owners will want to see a few years of sustained sell-outs in the Premier League before considering a stadium increase. Cortese is a businessman and won't be looking to increase the stadium just on a vanity exercise or **** measuring competition. So I think, for now, talk of a capacity increase at St Marys is fanatastically premature. First we have to get to the Premier League. Then we would have to show at least 4 or 5 years of sustained capacity crowds, with a high level of season ticket sales.If/when we do get back to the Premier League I imagine Cortese will be looking very carefully at a number of factors, including: What is our average home attendance; are we consistently selling out of home tickets pretty much every single week (even against the lower ranked teams)? If we are selling out, how many enquiries for tickets are we receiving after the sold out date? What is the level of season tickets sold? Persoanlly, I think we'll only ever increase the capacity if a number of factors are met: If we sell out the home allocation every single week (not 3/4 of the time, every single week for 2 or 3 seasons running). If we seem to be receiving hundreds, thousands of ticket enquiries after tickets have sold out. If our level of season tickets sold reaches 25K or 26K. From past history we clearly haven't ever reached those levels, which is why it is extremely premature to contemplate an expansion right now. 5 or 10 years time, who knows? But until we hit those years of sustained evidence for a need for a bigger ground, we have one perfectly suited to our needs right now.

And tickets will be cheaper, apparently.

I'm going to end here, because all you're providing is speculation. Of course a successful side will attract more customers, that's common sense. However, Cortese is a businessman and will surely look at the fact that we didn't used to sell out week in week out, and only averaged between 30K and 31K whilst also ahving a considerable number of games in the league and cups that fell well short of that. A capacity increase up to 40K would cost at least £25M. To justify that outlay, we would need to be sure of filling that every single week, which we clearly haven't been able to do even in the current size of stadium. And the possibility of having 4 or 5 games a season where we're more than 10K adrift of capacity is not a great incentive to such a huge outlay of cost. I'd love to see us in a bigger stadium, and filling it every week, of course I would. I just think we're at least 5 or 6 years away from proving that there is a need for a stadium increase. And with that I'm off.

I've already answered this. Against the big sides there's no doubt we used to sell out. How many more tickets we could have sold is entirely hypothetical though. And I would suggest that 4 or 5 games a season out of 19 that get nowhere near capacity (our lowest crowds of 26,794, 25,714 and 27,343 in 01/02, 02/03 and 04/05) is a very indicator to the fact that we're not hitting capacity "week in week out over 4 years" or however you put it. And in the fact that our home FA Cup ties were pitifully attended (even in cup final year we played at home 3 times and for two of those games against Spuds and Millwall we had crowds of 25, 589 and 23,809). There's no doubt in my mind we could sell out 35K against the big sides consistently. Maybe even get towards 40K for 1 or 2 games. But against the lesser teams our level was consistently around the 30-31K mark, we just didn't have a complete sell out over any sort of extended time frame. Given the massive costs in taking our capacity up, I don't see a justification for it using past records.

Its not nonsense at all. I chose a figure of 31K because the away end had a maximum size of 3,200. We didn't always give that size allocation to every club, for some games extra home seats would go on sale and the home figure ate into that 3,200. I used to sit in the Northam and can remember quite a few games when the away fans were very close (large proportion of tickets) and equally many games when there was an entire block of Saints fans to the left that had eaten to an unwanted away allocation. If you want another stat, 5 games in 2001/02 had less than 30K. 4 games in 02/03 had less than 30K. And 5 again in 04/05. You can't plame away attendance on those, we simply couldn't fill the ground.

For the bigger games; no doubt. But I think you're maybe losing track of how many games didn't sell out. If you take into account fluctuations with the away segregation, you can probably say that a crowd of 31K might be achieving home capacity (and that's being very generous). In 2001/02 we had 8 home league games with less than 31K (that's almost half). In 2002/03 we had 6 home league games with less than 31K (that's just about one third). In 2003/04 we had 1 home league game with less than 31K. In 2004/05 we had 8 home league games with less than 31K (that's almost half). So really we have just one season where you could argue we hit capacity, and another 3 where our stadium was the right size for us.

Rupert Lowe was obviously in charge during the 4 years you keep referring to; he maintained that there was no point in considering an increase in capacity until we regularly achieved more than 25K season ticket holders. Not once did we achieve that. Despite our average being around 31.5K, we also used to get gates of 30K - 31K on quite a regualr basis (against the lower ranked teams). If we had sold out the ground week in, week out, year in, year out then that would be evidence we need a bigger ground. We had one year when attendances were close to capacity, the other years proved that our ground was the perfect size for us. If we get back to the Premier League, and if we're selling out week in week out, then that will be evidence for an increase in capacity. Until then, I think we've got bigger fish to fry trying to sell out our current stadium; with the price hikes we've seen this year I think subsequent hikes in the Prem to around £35 - £40 a ticket could well have a detrimental effect of higher numbers.

A lot of Premier League clubs have dropped their prices, in order to actually try and fill their ground. The price change has been forced upon those clubs (particularly in the north-west where there is massive local competition) as they are continually seeing empty seats every week. There's simply no point building a new stadium to then have an enormous struggle to sell tickets for the increased capacity. Your second point is one I have been making for a while. Increased stadium capacity for Saints is just an exercise in vanity. The real additional revenues come in prize money, television rights and sponsorship. When compared to the massive earning potential of those three, the extra revenues gained from an additional few thousand tickets on a matches pales really equates to small change.

Why would it? Why would spending many millions of pounds on an increased capacity mean that we would then lower our prices? It makes no commercial sense whatsoever. The only point of increasing capacity would be to satisfy an increased demand; and if demand is there, again it makes no commercial sense at all to sell tickets at a lower premium than could be achieved. I'm sure Arsenal fans would love it if your business model was applied to ther ticket pricing; unfortunately they found the very opposite to be true upon departure of Highbury and arrival at the Emirates.

Anyone who thinks we need a 45K -50K stadium is a bit mental. The only way we'd fill that would be to let in huge numbers of away fans; that's just not going to happen. Besides, there's probably only 5 or 6 clubs that would bring more than 7K or 8K away fans, if the tickets were available. A larger stadium wouldn't impinge on the number of away fans who would come to matches, by the rules anyway. Premier League rules dictate 10% of the stadium capacity or 3,000 seats be made available to away fans, whichever is lowest. So any stadium capacity increase would have no bearing on how many extra tickets we'd have to provide for away teams. With that in mind, it's sheer folly to suggest there are up to an extra 18,000 fans who would just come out of the woodwork and attend every game. Not going to happen. The best case scenario (IMO at least) is for a stadium increase to 40K. With a mid-table or above team I think we'd fill this against Man Utd, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, Spurs and Man City. After that, maybe looking at up to 36K against the likes of Villa and Newcastle (again, if we're mid-table or above). Games against Wigan, Bolton, Blackburn, Sunderland, Wolves, West Brom, we'd be doing well to get 32K.

Remind me how many first team strikers (without Guly) we went into last season with.

I'd be very disappointed if that were the case; IMO we need 4 or 5 to be competing in this league. Plus the "quotes" attributed to that scout fella go along the same lines (whether he is joining us or not is another matter altogether).

Yep, very much this. Gekko's design also includes the scarf, which I think is a really nice touch, and the wave, which is also a great improvement. The distressed lettering on my old design only really worked with that previous image; Gekko's is much cleaner and brighter and therefore works much better with a clean, bright lettering. I do very much agree with the idea of making the image as big as possible, but there's obviously a limit to when the lettering becomes too small. I'm sure a decent designer, even the flag manuafcturer maybe, can advise to exactly what that is. In short; I think Gekko's image is perfect for this: I think it needs to be sorted out with the size and style of lettering, but overall I think it's a great effort so far.

Number 2 for me; although number 1 is also very good. EDIT: And please not with a halo; I think it cheapens it. Top work (yet again) Gekko.

Gekko's is definitely the best image so far. I'm not sure the size or style of font works exactly right, but it's nearly there. In any case, the image is all important and this is definitely the way it should be IMO.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with them. They supposedly are still in plenty of financial trouble, but most of all their success last year was built upon a significant number of loans. They've lost their entire strike force in Bellamy, Bothroyd and Chopra plus a number of others throughout the team. Mackay is a good manager, which could be the factor that saves them, but I also wouldn't be surprised to see them struggle.

The problem you have with that is that the noises coming out of the club suggest they fully expect us to have a crack at it. And they're largely right; why target medocrity from the outset? "Consolidating" effectively means standing still, and I'm pretty sure the Chairman won't want that. The problem is that Nicola's previous utterances on the subject and the whole plan to return to the Premier league have led to a level of expectation amongst supporters whereby mid-table will be deemed as a complete failure by many. If we do, as has been suggested, go out and sign 4 or 5 top quality players then yes, I think the expectation can be justified. Until then, I think we could be in for a very difficult season.

Very much agree; its a hugely competitive league and anyone who thinks a top half finish is in the bag is deluded IMO. I think we need to strengthen in all areas; at least 5 new first team players needed until I would consider us capable for a shot at the top.

I always wondered if he could play in the number 10 position, just behind the front striker(s). With Lallana and Guly both not being traditional wingers I also wondered if a Christmas tree formation might work: stadard back 4, Schneiderlin hammond and Chaplow in midfield, Guly and Lallana behind Lambert. Of course the full backs would have to provide the width.

It's taking a lot of people a lot of time to realise that we're not a big fish in a little pond any more. There are many clubs around us now who are of a similar size. Add in parachute payments to relegated sides and we're at a distinct disadvantage to the spending power of a number of other sides.

Cheerss Crabby.

I don't know what font Crabby used for the text so made do with something similar.

Same website; the 2007 game. http://eastleighfc.blogspot.com/2007/07/six-goal-thriller-friendly-eastleigh-v.html Plenty of first team players in that too. Playing a reserve team against Eastleigh is a relatively new thing.

2006 actually; I found the match report online. http://eastleighfc.blogspot.com/2006/07/eastleigh-2-1-saints.html And Burley was the manager, not Redknapp.