OFT endorse Rag compuslory cup scheme

[Dubai Blue]

I was joking! It must be beer time already in Dubai. Cheer yourself up and have a quick look at the Rag comments. They even moan about being £650m in debt. Please ask for extra irony with your next pint!

It's been a long day.

Can't be arsed to read it tbh. But while it may be amusing to see the rags get shit on in the short term, this rulling will have worrying implications for all football supporters in the long term. If one set of greedy, money-grabbing bastards can get away with it, you can bet your house on the fact that the rest of them will try it too.

Indeed. I apologise for any unintended offence. I have posted it as a form of warning of what could happen. We can all see how expectations have changed in the last eight months but I would hope that ADUG are more far-sighted than the Glaisers, who are in the process of destroying the Rags' support forever.

Indeed they are. And it seems they're also increasing the prices of their season tickets at a time when lots of other teams are announcing reductions. I would like to think that ADUG have more brains than to follow suit; gate receipts aren't a particularly large source of revenue anymore, although when you're as mortgaged to the hilt as the window fitters are, I guess every penny counts.

 

[Prestwich_Blue]

I was joking! It must be beer time already in Dubai. Cheer yourself up and have a quick look at the Rag comments. They even moan about being £650m in debt. Please ask for extra irony with your next pint!

It's been a long day.

Can't be arsed to read it tbh. But while it may be amusing to see the rags get shit on in the short term, this rulling will have worrying implications for all football supporters in the long term. If one set of greedy, money-grabbing bastards can get away with it, you can bet your house on the fact that the rest of them will try it too.

Indeed. I apologise for any unintended offence. I have posted it as a form of warning of what could happen. We can all see how expectations have changed in the last eight months but I would hope that ADUG are more far-sighted than the Glaisers, who are in the process of destroying the Rags' support forever.

Indeed they are. And it seems they're also increasing the prices of their season tickets at a time when lots of other teams are announcing reductions. I would like to think that ADUG have more brains than to follow suit; gate receipts aren't a particularly large source of revenue anymore, although when you're as mortgaged to the hilt as the window fitters are, I guess every penny counts.

Gate receipts are still pretty healthy for them for a number of reasons. First, they charge higher prices and second, their capacity is far higher than anyone else's. In 2007/8 their match-day income was just over £100m, which is 40% of their total income.

Alistair Mackintosh used to talk about football being "price inelastic"; i.e. the level of attendances wouldn't go down significantly if prices went up (and vice versa). That has been proved wrong to some degree as the Hamburg game proved. "Price it right and they will come" (to mis-quote Field of Dreams). The rags have also proved it works the other way, with a slighrt but noticeable dip in attendances. The Glazers' strategy has been to try to squeeze every last penny out of the fans, hence the price rises and compulsory cup scheme. There are signs though that they've taken this about as far as they can for the moment. So the relatively modest rises would seem to indicate that they know this but they'll try to get it back in other ways (catering & merchandising presumably).