"On the money" is the right answer, de Niro, because it is what drives the top teams to stay at the top. CL money is massive compared to the Europa league and mental compared to not being in it.
The Sheikh has built a self-sustaining model built on CL revenues, like it or not. He has not ploughs a billion into the club and it's future only to say "Fuck it, the Chumps Lge is bent, I want no part of it!" Every business in the world is bent and football is no different...it is just bent on a different scale than it was in the 70s!
We need to get over our precious selves when it comes the CL. It is THE football competition to be in and we need to embrace the suck that has been city in it for the past few years and simply improve! If we were playing on a level of Barca, Real, Bayern, PSG, Chelsea, we would all over this competition like white on rice, but because we sputter and because we have yet to go deep, we ACT like we don't care!
Bollocks!
I remember the it a euro nights against the likes of Gornik, ffs! What would be the attendance for a game against a team like that today? How cheap would the tickets have to be?!
And therein lies the rub! The CL is all about MONEY, and many, many True Blue City fans simply do not have enough to cover the Prem, League Cup, FA Cup, and Champions League.
So, the owners have a dilemma...do they ignore that simple fact, do they make the Lge Cup and FA Cup dirty cheap so we fill the stadium, do they make ALL tickets less expensive, what do they do?
We have bandied that around on here until the cows come home, but there needs to be a multi-layered strategy to aid BOTH the club and the fans. What that is, or should be, is hard to know without seeing the books.
All I can say is that if we are going to have a 62,000 seater stadium, we have to get the balance right for the people who want to turn up every game, or for the vast majority of them. Corporate sponsorship revenues make ticket revenues pale in comparison, so we need to push that as hard as it can go and use it as an offset against lowering ticket prices.
In fact, we should have a £20/15/10/5 (Middle tier, Upper, Lower, Kids & OAPs) ticket pricing policy for Cup Games, with that maybe slightly raised a few quid for the CL games. This would better allow the locals to see games, and there would still be plenty of "away day" tickets for the corporate plans that help cover the costs of lower tickets for all.
Another thing could be a "Friendly Competitor" policy, whereby City offer those cut rate prices to their competitors, as long as they do the same for the City away allocation...so that City fans that go away only pay what away fans pay in our ground.
Regardless of what it is, something has to be done and City, under the current leadership, could lead the way and get some positive press out of it, too! And, when they open the new third tiers, City could make the announcement that new ticket prices for next season and beyond will not only be lowered, but their season on season increase will be capped at £X or X% per year. That would help everyone plan accordingly and know that what they could and could not afford.
There are simple and elegant solutions to pricing, but someone at the club needs to have the conviction and foresight to make the leap. Another thing we should do is make City fan gear more affordable at the City Store. When I go online and look at pricing, especially when I compare it to regular pricing in America in dollars, it is simply ridiculously priced. Maybe, with a ticket, we could provide a credit system, whereby a Season Ticket holder gets a better % discount upto a certain sales level! then it kicks up a notch to a higher %, this making more fear more affordable.
Another system would be that on a matchday, your ticket is a discount coupon. It would get people in the store, get people to the games earlier, and it might just provide the fan with an excellent offset to their ticket price if they could buy a ticket for £20 and save £10-20 on buying a City shirt for that game.
Tiered pricing is also another marketing strategy, whereby those games that are less desirable and attract less fans have a higher matchday ticket % savings. Scan your matchday ticket against West Brom, and save 20% instead of the 10% you get against Liverpool, for instance.
All of these things return VALUE to the fan, while also driving matchday revenues. Simple and straightforward ideas that can separate City, as a family club, from other clubs.
