stevegrant

Missed 5 away games (Sheff Weds, Yeovil, Oldham, Walsall, Colchester), done all the rest.

As horrific as that sounds, that price does include all home Champions League group games and (I think) FA Cup ties. Still expensive, but there are added benefits at Arsenal. A few other clubs are doing the same for next season - Hereford's season tickets will include home cup games in all three competitions.

There are so many differences between the "matchday experience" in Germany and the same in this country though. In Germany: Ticket prices are sensible - in fact, I'm sure I heard that there are rules in place which stipulate that at least a proportion of tickets must not be higher than a particular price. There is an even distribution of seated and standing tickets so supporters have a choice of how they want to watch the game. Supporters aren't treated like the scum of the earth by authorities. Supporters aren't treated like complete idiots by their club. Matches aren't moved en masse for television, the vast majority kick off at 2.30pm on a Saturday Public transport providers don't hike up the prices as soon as fans start buying advance fare tickets And that's just for starters. Cash is king in English football - there's plenty of money swirling around the Bundesliga, but the clubs also realise that without the fans, they have no product to market. The likes of Richard Scudamore would do well to remember that fact.

You might be right there - I know that at least part of that upper tier was added afterwards, assumed it was all of it as it looks really strange and not the sort of thing I'd have imagined being incorporated into the original design.

Not necessarily. Sponsorship is such an intangible product, and it's probably more closely linked with the press exposure the sponsor will achieve than the number of people who will see their name in the stadium.

So £40m to increase capacity by 8,000. £5,000 per seat. Repaid by 10 seasons of complete sell-outs, I guess, but still one hell of an investment if they end up going down...

And what will the new capacity be?

I think the Wolves expansion (not even 1000 seats, I think) is a temporary, uncovered section in the corner. They've got plans to rebuild at least two of the current stands, but I suspect that depends on them staying up. Sunderland's upper tier wasn't there when they first built the Stadium of Light - that was added a couple of years later at considerable expense. Rupert Lowe and Andrew Cowen's analysis of stadium expansion was always that while you could build a new stadium for around £1000 per seat, expanding that stadium further down the line would then cost £3000 per seat. That was in 2004/5, so it's probably even higher now. Adding 10,000 seats to SMS would more than double the cost of the original build of the stadium.

And of course if the worst happens and we end up getting relegated again, we'd possibly be lucky to even half-fill it, leaving us with a rather large white elephant.

That assumes we allow away teams to bring 5,000. Old Trafford holds more than 76,000, but they only give just over 3,000 to away fans. Firstly, they have the capability to sell those extra seats to home fans; secondly, they don't want to give any sort of potential advantage to the opposition.

Linking a Man United PL game to, say, a Wigan PL game could cost anything up to £80. Would that not be just a touch off-putting?! The "linked" game will always be unattractive compared to the main event - whether it's Carlisle in League One or Wigan in the Premier League, it's still got the same (lack of) appeal. The original technical plans for SMS allow for the Northam, Chapel and Kingsland stands to be extended, up to a maximum capacity of 55,000. The Itchen can't be expanded because of the already-massive weight of the offices and corporate facilities on the foundations. However, I would be amazed if the council granted planning permission for any expansion without the re-introduction of the public transport travel schemes that were in operation until 3 years ago - they were a condition of the original build.

I think we averaged 30k+ over the course of the 4 seasons there, and around 2002-4 I think we had something like 22 consecutive sell-outs, so if the team is doing well, the people will follow, but back then we did also have a 3-tier ticket pricing structure, so it wasn't such a hard sell to fill 28,000 seats for a game against Middlesbrough. If I remember rightly, the year we went down, we actually had a 4-tier pricing structure, with 4 games being classified as "platinum" (Pompey, Man United, Arsenal and Chelsea), which I think were somewhere in the region of £34. Knocking two or three quid off per tier, that gets you down to £25-27 for a "bronze" game back in 2005, which seems fairly reasonable, especially for someone who can't afford the top prices or isn't one of the first in line to get a general sale ticket. The membership scheme the club used to operate meant that for a long period of time, many games never reached general sale. Of course, matchday ticket prices become a bit of an irrelevancy after a while - they're important to begin with to get people through the gate, but as soon as you start selling out, all of a sudden a season ticket becomes a much more valued commodity, so there are then fewer matchday tickets available each week. At one stage, we had 23,000 season ticket holders. If we get back to (and beyond) that stage again, I would suggest that would be the time to seriously look at expanding the ground.

I'm not convinced. We didn't sell out against Man United at £30 a head, why would we do so at £45? Yes, it was twinned with the Carlisle game, but it would also get twinned with a game against a team nobody cares about if it was a Premier League game. They might get away with big buck prices for the top games if we're doing well, but can you see us filling SMS for a game against Blackburn or Wigan at those sort of prices?

I can't see how they'll take nearly half their average home attendance to an away game 150 miles away, regardless of the importance of the game. Wouldn't surprise me if a lot of those tickets ended up in the hands of Saints fans, to be honest.

Avatars are only available to full members, I'm afraid.

Walsall have an allocation of 1200 tickets, which I assume is the lowest amount they can actually segregate. What surprised me the most, though, looking on their OS, was that we hadn't sent them the tickets until this morning!

It should be relatively straightforward, give the turnstile operators a list of banned names and seat numbers and they check against them as people enter the ground. There won't be many, and as soon as one is spotted, the season ticket is either confiscated or they go to the ticket office to hand their money over. Not an ideal solution, by any means, but it's still possible to achieve if they wanted to. Well, Cortese was quoted as saying that they can't/won't implement a payment plan until there is some sort of automated entry system - whether that means the club actually plans to pay the best part of half a million quid to safeguard a tenth of that in season ticket revenue (assuming all those "defaulting" did so intentionally any not as a result of either the club taking the payments on different days each month or the card having expired before all payments were made - I know of two people who fell into the latter category, they phoned the club to sort the issue as they noticed the money hadn't been taken out, the club didn't seem to be proactive about pursuing it at all) is open to conjecture and guesswork. From what I remember of the dinner reports from a few months ago, Cortese didn't actually go as far as committing to implementing an automated solution.

I think comparing any price rise with inflation in this instance isn't really fair as what we'll be getting next season isn't like-for-like. The bigger clubs in the Championship charge anything up to £35 for matchday tickets, which, compared with £22-25 at St Mary's this season, is a pretty big leap.

I had a treble on us, Cardiff and Norwich yesterday - hardly sticking my neck out, but I'm quite happy to lose the fiver stake and potential £20 profit to see them balls it up again

Bournemouth, because they'd stand absolutely no chance of competing with us next season. With the right signings, the other three could. However, Huddersfield are clearly the most deserving of the four.

Uh-oh... here we go again To clarify, there are various ways the club can run an instalment plan. Many use an external finance company because it can be a pain in the arse registering for the direct debit scheme, and if the club were to go down that avenue, they would more than likely receive all the money up front, with the finance company receiving the instalments. Disclaimer: other finance models are available

Yeah, I prefer the "we do what we're told" alternative

If I remember correctly, the renewal price for this season was £355, so I would expect the discounted renewal price to be in the region of £400

OK, after a bit of a fail on my part for the Hartlepool game, I'm pretty sure it'll be working for the Brentford game

I suspect this might have something to do with that story and its timing - no named quotes, just "an FA source", that could be anyone.