Could be another factor couldn't it? Football seems to be going along cheerily not giving a toss about getting them back, it's going to end badly.
As a teenager watching the football I don't think I would have been as interested if I would have been surrounded just by people my parents age and older.
We’ve really not looked after the younger generation thus the future generation in the last decade or so at City and across many (but not all) clubs across the country.
We moved everyone out of the North Stand to create a Family Stand, which was probably the biggest Family Stand in the country (in a lot of grounds the Family Stand is just a couple of blocks, but at the Etihad it’s twice the size of our Singing Section), yet we kept banging prices up and pricing kids out of this huge stand.
Some of the pricing for children at City has been ridiculous. Last season, maybe ⅓ of PL games were £48 for children and prices had been silly for years, when it’s been £9 for children in every stand for every PL game at Liverpool for years and until this season it was £13 for children in most areas for every PL game at United (but it’s now much more aligned to ours… Berrada?)
City have dropped prices this season but wouldn’t have done without our protests. And years of kids being priced out will have seen them take up different hobbies and interests than attending expensive football matches.
For a long time City (and Everton) have had very old supports. With large numbers of fans having been ST holders for decades. But as the decades pass by, we all get older, more frail, unwell or die. So who’s taking our place?
The PL clubs are riding on the crest of a wave at the moment and have the tourists attendees in their thousands across most grounds. But we saw what happened to Italian football and should know nothing lasts forever. If we take a nose dive (and that’s not implausible with the way the PL is being run into the ground by fucking idiots like Masters) we could easily see what happened to Serie A happen to the PL and have half empty statiums every week as all the tourists fuck off to the Bundesliga and the ticket tout agencies can’t shift tickets for love nor money for PL games come 2035, and there are far too few local fans attending games to make up for it, even with cheaper tickets because they were forgotten about by clubs.
I posted this earlier in this thread:
Yep, doesn’t matter who anyone supports when it comes to this. Fans have to take a stand and do it together as one before it’s too late.
English football is going to implode soon. It’ll be like Serie A from the late 90s and 00s where ticket prices went through the roof and fans just stopped going.
Juventus used to get about 25,000 in their old Stadio Delle Alpi which held 70,000. There was a Turin derby in that stadium that had an attendance of just 19,000 in 2003… and Juve got to the CL final that season. That stadium was only built in 1990 and ended up being knocked down in 2009. It was newer than the Etihad is now when it was demolished.
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Even the two best supported clubs: Inter and Milan; struggled with 36,000ish average attendances in their 80,000 San Siro at times in the mid 2010s.
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Roma v Sampdoria in 2014:
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Clubs priced out their fans, fans stopped going, huge stadiums were empty, TV companies stopped buying their TV rights and the clubs were skint. Only 2 Italian teams have won the CL since 2003, and none in the last 14 years.
It’s slowly starting to get better in Serie A now. The Milan clubs are back getting 72,000 average attendances. It’s probably the second best quality league in Europe behind the PL now. But it had two decades where it ate itself and was in a terrible mess for what was once the greatest league in the world that everyone wanted to watch.
Yet even now they are showing they haven’t learnt their lesson: look at the attendance between Milan and Liverpool earlier this season in the CL: 58,000, 22,000 empty seats when their Serie A attendances are over 70,000… all because they tried to cash-in. Tickets were said to start at €125 for home fans. That’s half a season ticket in the Bundesliga, just for one CL game.
The Serie A warning is there.
We have a new stand to fill next season but we should be targeting local and proper City fans to fill it. Existing ST holders with a good price initiative to move there to make a racket, lapsed ST holders and existing non-ST membership fans, initiatives like Liverpool have around fans with an ‘L’ postcode to target fans with an ‘M’ postcode or ‘0161’ area code, initiatives like Liverpool have to get kids in really cheap.
I don’t think we should be aiming for the tourist market for this stand, especially when they’ll be paying a lot of money yet only getting a shit behind-the-goal view when they’d probably be expecting the much better side-stand views for the money they’ll be paying. But with the utter lack of a push by the club to market this stand as a stand for vocal City fans, I can’t see it (especially with the hotel joined onto it) being anything other than a tourists stand.
And I think that’s a dangerous and short-sighted short-term pound-sign game to play.
We’ve already seen this season chunks of seats at the top of the Colin Bell Stand that the ticket tout sites have failed to shift. There were noticeably chunks of empty seats in the corner of the North Stand and East Stand against Burnley. That’s just after one year of not winning trophy. What happens if it’s ten? or if the PL does nose dive?
People often ignore this sort of thing when the team is winning and often think that sell out games show that it’s not a problem, but it is because there’s a long-term issue at play in the background that clubs aren’t paying attention to (maybe they don’t care because they’ll just retire or get another job when the shit hits the fan so won’t be arsed?).
The drop in prices of match tickets and price freeze of STs is a start, but there needs to be a full long-term initiative that fans are involved in around ticketing to ensure we can combat any future difficult times for the club or league.
