There is a really important point on pricing

A football club is not like another business where you plot your demand curve and hit the biggest gate profit. The lifeblood is fans, and income will be incremental from those fans and spread over a variety of offerings, most of which are not football per se but upsells/me-toos and brand extensions (cf Delia's).

Hit the sweet spot on the demand curve and yes you will maximise gate receipt profits. But the fanbase will be smaller than it might have been and you miss out those incremental streams.

There is a point on cashflow: it can seem tempting to take as much as possible Right Now. However more or less every major Plc has been moving as fast as it can from product-based to service-based offerings: rather than earn ?100 Right Now, earn ?25/year but over six years locked in and guaranteed.

The top line of the business is skewed towards the TV income which to my mind at least gives breathing space to price casual tickets sensibly - i.e. for less than they could sell them all for - and to make as many more of them available as the capital budget allows, predicated on sensible assumptions on future trajectory.

There is that jump between the season about to come and the next one and that might be a good enough excuse to prevaricate, though my personal preference would be to go now with expansion and tie it to sensible pricing (clue: ?50 is not remotely sensible).

I don't know the numbers so can't crunch them. But I do hope this kind of thing is being looked at properly and hard and we're not just going forward on lazy assumptions.

#channellingjim

Posted By: Old Man, May 28, 20:22:46