The Kraken

Scrapping of installment plan: understandable to get rid of the plan, but unforgivable to not give enough notice for fans to prepare other payment options. Ticket tax: understandable to charge a fee rather than add on to ticket prices, but £3 seems way over the odds of the actual costs involved. Lack of half-season tickets: really can't fathom this one. Lack of ST holder priority for Bournemouth game: a bit daft by the club, no real reason not to do this and a bit of a kick in the bawls for ST holders. It'll be interesting to see what the approach is for more major cup games, if its general sale for all then I think its a bit of a worry. Lack of clear communication from the club: this is a definite area of concern for me. The club absolutely has the right to change its working practises as it sees fit, but to score a series of potential own goals along the way without clearly defining matters to the customers seems a bit odd. As has been stated, all of the issues above are relatively small on their own but when added up together it begins a slightly worrying trend. And one that could easily be avoided if the club would just live up to their promises of engaging with the supporters.

Any number of reasons. But last season had he left he would have done so to become number 2 to Rob Green and therefore have little or no prospect of first team football. If he were to get an offer this time round as first choice keeper at a Prem club it would be very difficult to turn that down this late in his career. Anyway, this is all just idle speculation (for now).

Greed is good.

It's perhaps unfair to blame the club over ticket prices given that the price is determined by both clubs. From the Carling Cup rules.... 22 Tickets 22.1 Immediately after the draw is known the two clubs concerned must mutually agree the prices. all questions in dispute must be immediately referred to the Management Committee for settlement. The decision to not allow ST holders first option on tickets to claim their own seats is a bit daft though; unfortunately another small sign that the most loyal customers are not being put first.

Just playing devil's advocate, but they do charge a delivery fee if you don't go in-store for the purchase. Likewise with the club, if you go to the club for your ticket (before the day of the game) there is no extracharge. I don't for one minute agree with the booking fee and think it is a complete con; that said, there are "some" costs involved with the distribution of match tickets, though I very much agree that these should be subsumed into the total price. Either that or the price for sending out tickets should be more proportional to the actual cost (say £1) rather than a blatant money-making scheme.

Stag do in Amsterdam + Saints on TV = win win.

Nick, you are very right of course, and once the season gets underway and (hopefully) the club gets off to a flying start then I'm sure this will very quickly slip into the dima nd distant past. That said, its just very disappointing how completely unnecessary this all is, and how it could have been so easily avoided with just a small amount of consideration from the club.

John, I'll refer you to the first quote I listed in my summary above. It was lifted from Nicola Cortese's introduction to the document. "I firmly believe that this Supporter’s Charter will be the embodiment of what we stand for and it will target what we deliver year in, year out.” It should be pointed out, we are far from the only club to have some form of Fans' charter. It is not a ground-breaking document, it is very simple in that it sets out the basic aims and working practises of the club. If others think it holds little weight then fine, that's your opinion, but I have to disagree. I find it a little disconcerting how far the club has deviated from its stated principles of "engagement with the fans" in only a very short time.

Quite clearly a fair few people do care about it DellDays. If you don't, then it's not really an issue that affects you is it? So why bother commenting?

Yeah, because £1,600 a month just gets you nothing at all these days...

So after 8 pages I’ve come to the following conclusion: Pretty much everyone agrees that the club has no obligation to provide an interest/cost free instalment plan. There is mixed opinion over whether the club should provide a payment scheme through a third party. Immaterial of the above, most people agree that the club should have given more notice of the intention to scrap the old payment scheme. No-one can come up with a sensible idea as to why half-season tickets have been scrapped. The club seems to have done too little in the active recruitment of existing season ticket holders. Pretty much everyone agrees (to differing extents) that the club has communicated poorly with the fans over the above issues. And a lot of the resentment felt towards the club by some over these issues could very easily have been solved by the club communicating better. To conclude; two key excerpt from the Supporters Charter read as follows: "I firmly believe that this Supporter’s Charter will be the embodiment of what we stand for and it will target what we deliver year in, year out.” “Within the next few months we will be delivering news of our Supporter Engagement Policy whereby our supporters, specifically our Season Ticket Holders, can actively play a part in dialogue with their club in an effort to shape its destiny, such as pricing policies for ticketing and retail products. We intend this strategy to be ground breaking in football by enabling supporters to build a unique relationship with the Club.” The one common area of agreement within this thread seems to be that the club has fallen down in engaging with the supporters over the key issue of ticketing. And this is such an easy thing to prevent, and indeed to rectify. As supporters we’re not asking for involvement with everything that the club does, and indeed understand that there are a huge amount of decisions which will be made by the club which have absolutely no right being aired in the public domain. We are simply asking for the club to live up to the promises that it made in their own formal published document.

It's not as if publishing ST prices in March is such a hugely innovative step though is it? As a club we've done it plenty of times before. We were massively late in announcing our prices, I believe the 23rd team in our league to do it, which made the news of the scrapping of the installment plan all the more mystifying and frustrating for many.

You need to also consider our net spend as well to see the full context of our spending. Summer 2009 we sold the likes of McGoldrick, Dyer, Surman, Rasiak, BWP, Euell, John etc for a total of £3M. So we effectively lost £3M worth of talent from a side that wasn't very good to begin with. So the money we had to fork our for Lambert, Hammond, Jaidi, Harding, and all of the Xmas arrivals was significantly offset by the incoming transfer fees.

"In a continuing effort to strive for wider access to matches, the club will offer a payment plan for season tickets to make them cost-effective." I read that on the web too.

If that's the case then why suggest in the Supporters Charter that the club would continue to offer payment plans for Season Tickets. Whether or not you think the club SHOULD offer them is immaterial; they said that they would and haven't. Simple really.

Not if the club produce a Supporters' Charter which is very specific in outlining that: Travel is provided for home supporters to travel to away games. All travel is made available at cost price with no profit to the club.

And if we could also add Tommy FourPast to that list we'd be pretty much rid of all the clutter.

Very happy to see all of the dead wood being trimmed; our squad was massively bloated to begin with, and consisted of many players that would never have a chance of first team football. Given that he was now fourth or fifth choice at LB this makes perfect sense. Still would like to see another 4 or 5 players arrive in the next few days and weeks but have full faith in the club that they'll provide AP with the players he wants. Of course we won't hear about it until it happens, but I actually quite like that.

Agreed. I'm all for a bit of speculation about the price and what benefits membership will bring, but complaining about it now without knowing any facts seems a bit retarded.

No, the club have already announced that they are releasing details of the new membership scheme in early July. But yes, the rest of the thread is complete speculation about the cost of the scheme and what benefits it will entail.

As I said, this is all just wanton speculation until the full details are announced.

You'd have to question exactly what you'd get for that much money. £20 in the PL was just about bearable as you got money off the ticket but most importantly it gave you priority for tickets for the sell-out games. In League 1 that's just not going to be an issue, so I'm not sure how they'd justify a similar membership fee unless giving £2 off the ticket price, or it means you don't pay the booking fee. £25/£30 would be a ridiculous price unless the club are going to offer something massively substantial for the privilege of being a member. Anyway, this is all just wanton speculation until the full details are announced.

The sad fact is hypo that the fans' forum is really the only way of getting the club to engage with the customers. Contacting the club directly has had no impact (I have first hand experience of this), and it could be argued that discussions on here have prompted the Echo to run with the stories and directly question the club, which again hasn't had the desired impact. Short of the fans forum, which I have severe doubts will be as open as last year(if indeed they actually have one) I'm afraid it's very much like it or lump it.

But there is a difference between slating him and asking some genuine questions of the club. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty on here (stanley for example) who seem to love taking digs at NC at any given opportunity. However, it would be extremely arrogant of NC to assume that every single decision he makes is going to be the right one. I've no doubt at all he's making decisions with all the right intentions; but he's running a football club for the first time and its only natural that he'll make the odd mistake here or there. As customers it is our right to question the club, especially when they produce a fans' charter and months later decide to ignore it. For the most part NC has been brilliant for the club, and if he's going to run the club his own way then we'll have to just get on with it. However, a football club is so much more than just a business, because the customers feel a massive empathy with the product provided. It would be a shame to see that diminish just because the owner won't adapt to the needs of the customer.

Sorry, but that makes very little sense to me. If the club were going to advertise externallly for season tickets then they would have started when they first went on sale. Why is there "no point" in advertising until 30th June? Season tickets have been on sale to both existing and new customers from 1st June. It would have made much more sense to advertise before now, as you can target new and existing customers in one advertising campaign. Waiting a month to target new customers and thereby ignoring dismissing existing customers makes no business sense at all as you are missing the majority of your target market.