SaintBobby

He was 80% fit for much of last season. And still damned good. 20 goals and 15 assists in the NPC, I reckon.

Can we make Duckhunter our MC please? Let's pay him more than the present bloke and get him to promise to do nothing. Not only would he earn some extra cash on a Saturday at SMS but the football experience would be much better for all of us. He gets a £50 bonus every time he doesn't play a jingle after a goal as well. Do we have a deal?

This is just to let you know why I won't be able to read or contribute to this thread again, thanks to the mrs. She asked "what the hell is this about?" (thankfully I was only on the Saints Forum as she looked over my shoulder....) Me: "It's a thread about transfer speculation" Her: "What's that when it's at home?" Me: "Ok, can you work out what it means? Here's a quiz for you...what does HCDAJFU stand for?" Her: "I have no f***ing idea" Me: "Try and work it out, then..." >> Her: "Is it.........How Could Davis And Jaidi F*ck Up?"

Good luck to him. But tbh, I'd forgotten about him already. He did okay for us - but doubt he was on the "must have" or even "might like to have" list.

Yes

Totally agree. I mean what to people want to do with it before Aug 7th? Stroke it? Frame it? Lick it? I guess the only issue is whether marketing earlier/better wld get more total sales. But I whinged about this last year and NC et al proved me totally wrong.

This is the essential point for me. Lack of competition. Not blaming any folk for this, loads of folk put time and effort into running things like SWF so schmucks like me can gas off. But we probably need an ebb and flow. Some fora rising. Some falling. Some dying. Some being born. Maybe the fanbase isn't big enough to support that? Or maybe new tech will change things anyway (I remember the days of being on an email list!)

I have 3 season tickets in Kingsland and want to move our seats. This may involve moving to the seat that your stepdaughter/mate/lover/accountant/lawyer/PR agent/wife would like to have if I didn't move there. However, you can be totally confident that the ticket office will enable STHs to sit together. This may mean you have to move from your preffered, say, row F to a slightly worse row J, but it can be done np.

What's interesting is that lots of us seem to think expectations are too high. But when you ask people what their expectations actually are, all those not taking the p i s s seem to agree that somewhere around 8th-14th would be prefectly ok.

Yep. They probably are all running at a loss. It might be a "worthwhile" loss. A bit licket "quids for a kid" nights - which aren't revenue maximising but may have preceived long-term potential. Otehr issues will be how easy/hard is it to get into home games and how broad the season ticket base is (Saints is very broad - with about 505 or more of our home attednance being season ticket holders).

Didier Drogba Tragic after the event.....with AFAIK no rumour beforehand...?

I'd say CMS. Have only seen him play 6 or 7 games, but he looks a cut above. also, think he's the least likely to sign for us unfortunately.

I doubt the release of the shirt in July, as opposed to, say, May, makes much difference to overall sales. There may be a tiny handful of people who would only buy the shirt in June and refuse to do so afterwards. These might, I suppose, be offset by a few people who find the build up such an amazing turn on that they can't resist an impulse purchase on 20th July but would otherwise not have bought the shirt. I'd imagine there may be a more prosaic explanation than accounting/fair play rules. For example (just speculative), do the kit designers/producers charge less if they don't have to deliver early - e.g. is there a bottleneck in knocking out shirts in May/June? Or is there any case that you might only want to give a design spec when you know what division you're in?

Well, I've worked for organisations that run membership schemes for about 16 years. The administartive costs - even when organised highly efficient - are high. You need to factor in staff time and overheads too. The actual cost to a company of sending a letter is nearly always more than a pound. Most membership organisations with many more than 1K members will have a full time staff member working largely on the membership database. In Saints' case, you'd also need to make the job of the ticket sales staff a tad more complicated. And you'd need to put in procedures to prevent fraud (casual fans buying a ticket on a mate's membership account to swell his loyalty points). You'd also need some procedure to resolve disputes (a member complaining that he'd definitely only used his discount rights seven times and the database was wrong). You can assume the real cost of staff time is £10 per hour for even a minimum wage worker. £20+ for moderately more qualified staff. I don't know how many years of experience you have running membership systems. But if you can point to any membership organisation in the UK that runs at less than £5 a member (discounting those run on a purely voluntary basis, where the human resource cost is zero), I'd be delighetd to hear about it. Party political memberships costs anywhere from £10-£20 a year to administer, for example.

Even if you want to add that in, you just need a database, not a membership scheme. We have that anyway (although I don't know how robust it is - but it is used for some games to stop members of the general public/opposition fans from buying tickets)

It wouldn't even wash its own face. It would raise nowhere near 25OK. It would be expensive to administer and you need to factor in opportunity costs. For example, some cuurent purchasers of season tickets might downgrade to mere membership and end up attending less games and handing over less money as a result. The scheme being proposed was for a 50 fee attached to a 40 discount. The club only clears a tenner per member. The admin costs are likely to be higher than this - but even if you assume that the cost would only be £5 per person to administer, you would need to sign up 50,000 members to make your suggested 250K profit. That simply isn't going to happen. There are, in practice, only a small number of fans a membership scheme would appeal to. A very high proportion of hardcore fans are already season ticket holders. Those who aren't are almost all able to get to all the games they want to go without the slightest problem (generally only home games). Those who are hardcore, but not season ticket holders, can often join a group like the London Saints Supporters Club who can help with tickets. So, those who are likely to see any real benefit in a membership scheme are nowhere near 50,000. Not 10,000. Possibly not even 1,000. And at this point, the income from a membership scheme probably doesn't even cover the administrative set-up costs, let alone the on running servicing costs. The 250K figure is just a fantasy number you've plucked out of the air. Running a scheme would cost the club money in the NPC.

It's a message board. Not a pub. Hope this helps. And I have no problem ending thoughts with saying "that'll do, it's good enough, that's okay". I don't know what pubs you go to where these words elicit extreme violence from anyone listening to them. Sounds pretty retarded to me. Your system isn't "fair"...STHs should get priority, even if they have attended one or two less away games. As I've said, your system is unnecessary anyway. Any sufficiently devoted fan will make it into any game they want, with possible excpetion of Pompey away. It's just not worth setting up a whole system to deal with one of the 46 league games.

I wouldn't back us at 5/1 to go up. I'd sat we're about a 10/1 shot. So I think the odds are mean. 5/1 on Portsmouth goign down is an excleent bet though. I'll have some of that.If they ceased ro trade, I think you'd bet your money back. If they went down becaue of a points deduction, you'd win your bet.

I said it DIDN'T upset me...just that it was a waste of money. And I outlined why I believed this to be the case.

It wouldn't upset me. It would just be a slightly stupid waste of money. The sentence you have highlighted in my post is accurate in every respect. I think it is true. And it is indeed true.

You want a "well informed debate" - indeed, would "happily engage" in one? But I'm "condescending and distatseful" in virtue of my posts being "written in a well structured format". I also have an "underlying superiority complex". And I should "tone it down". I'm not entirely clear whethe you are aspiring to be my psychologist or my mother. Or whether you are suitably qualified to fill either role! I'm surpised that you only welcome "well-mannered responses", given the rather abusive personal language you have used to describe me. Nevertheless, I shall try to meet your request rather than emulate your personalised, abusive behaviour. The issue absoultely is NOT "financial support" v "presence at games". The issue is how Saints should decide to issue scarce, very sought after away tickets (there's no real problem getting into home games). This system needs to have the features of being (a) fair in rewarding loyal fans and (b) simple and cheap to execute. The second of these is an important consideration. To take your own example to an even greater extreme...one can conceive of a Saints fan who has gone to every away game in the last five years but doesn't own a season ticket. In order to be completely fair to such a fan - or other cases such as a fan who has been to 500 away games in his life, but didn't go to any last year because he was recovering from cancer and also doesn't have a season ticket - Southampton FC could set up some committee system with appeals being possible for those disappointed by the original verdict. Applications for tickets to, say, Pompey away would be in writing and considered by the executive commitee on their merits. Every single one of 10,000 letters would be read, analysed, graded and rated. An interview process with the applicants could be considered. Perhaps marginal cases could meet Nicola Cortese and members of the Liebherr family for a four hour interview. Legal representation for applicants could be provided at the expense of the club. This is obviously a reducto ad absurdium, but just illusrates the point that total fairness is not possible. Nor indeed the club's problem. Generally speaking - only generally speaking - season ticket holder are the most loyal fans. Yes, there will be exceptions. Some season ticket holders are probably quite casual fans. There will be some non-season ticket holders who attend 40+ games a season. But, as a rule of thumb, it's a reasonable one. Hard-core fans who aren't season ticket holders do have other ways to access precious tickets. I think (although maybe wrong here) that the affilated supporters groups get a small ticket allocation for massive games. For the FA Cup final, for example, the London Saints Supporters Club were offered a block of about 30 tickets. I guess this applies to the West Country Saints too. If these arrangements have been abandoned, they should be reinstated. In short, if you're a mad keen, very loyal Saints fan in Bristol who (a) doesn't have a season ticket (b) isn't a member of the regional supporters group and © doesn't have the financial resources to secure a black market ticket to the away end at Fratton Park and (d) can't somehow pull a favour with the club or with the fanbase to secure a ticket, then, yes, you're going to miss out. Too bad. We can't make sure that the 2,324 tickets available for a particular away game go to the prefectly callibrated most loyal 2,324 fans. It's just too much like hard work. It's also essentially contestable and endlessly controversial. There isn't a "right" answer. But we probably can ensure that the 2,324 tickets are only shared out amongst, say, the most loyal 4,000 fans. And maybe a tiny handful of stragglers. That will do. That's okay. That's good enough.

It's not worth the candle. You may buy a membership for £50 and then go to 8 games (and get a saving of £40). This doesn't mean there's just a £10 admin "gain" for the club. You may have gone to these 8 games anyway. And the club would then have got exactly the same revenue, without having to post you some membership card and employing some bureaucratic box ticker to measure how many home games you've been to or employ a call centre to deal with people who want to use their 8th discount voucher for an away game or cup game. So, the costs for the club would be way higher than a tenner. Plus, it's pretty simple. We don't tend to sell out at SMS and this will tend to be the case next season too. If you're going to attend a decent number of home games and/or don't want the administrative hassle of booking seats for each game you want to go to, then buy a f-ing season ticket. The very best seats are available for less than £600. If you're only going to attend only a handful of home games (up to ten), then just get your life in order and book for the games you want. There was no game last season that you would have been unfairly excluded from. Walsall was a sell out but the only reason a member of the public wouldn't have got in was if they'd booked too late. A membership system doesn't solve this. We'd just have people whining that because they were a £50 member and had been for 4 years, someone at the club should have notified them that tickets were selling fast/they should receive preferential treatment and be allowed to come and go as they please/tickets went on general sale too quickly etc etc etc. I repeat. Even if you choose not to buy a season ticket, you will be able to get into every game at SMS next season as long as you are capable of runnign your life as something approaching a half-competent adult. On away tickets, the rule of priority is (and should be): 1. Hard core season ticket holders first (e.g. those who have attended 5+ away games) 2. The rest of the season ticket holders next 3. Non-season ticket holders who have attended a good number of away games next. 4. Every other human being on the planet on a first come first served basis. If you want a club badge, a club wallet and a list of club secrets, then write to the Beano and join the Dennis the Menace fanclub. If you want to watch Southampton play football, then get a grip on your life and your diary and don't bother designing highly complicated, enormously bureaucratic schemes which you want the club to carry out in order that your own specific needs and failings are catered for.

Golac?

Assuming this is correct, my question is "who was the first player sold by Saints for a six figure sum"?

a car....he hadn't passed his driving test