I appreciate we can all band numbers about.
Johnny Ball, think of a number.
And I appreciate seats+views will always be priced differently.
But let's say the Etihad was expanded to 62,000 via the North stand, and all 59,000 seats minus the away allocation were made season tickets priced at £299, which is our current cheapest adult seat The revenue from that would be £18.5mill a season. Now I appreciate you have to factor in kids, OAP's, and corps, so it's not that straight forward. I have know doubt we would sell out every game. The tills would be ringing at the bars inside and outside the ground, in the souvenir shop, the car parks would be full, and Pep would get his wish of a full and noisy Stadium. I'd even go as far as saying a 62,000 capacity stadium at that seaon ticket price wouldn't be enough. Make the NS a single tier and take the Etihad to 65,000-70,000.
Here's the catch. The bods are City who are running the pantomime don't see it like that. Somewhere amongst all those spreadsheets, graphs, pie charts, presentations, etc, is something that's holding them back, or even stopping them. The current sums just don't add up if City are asking the fans to pay a 2.5% increase, or £500,000-£1,000,000 in reals cash terms.
I don't see how that'd be viable.
The south stand expansion cost £75m and added 8,000 seats.
If they were all priced at £299 it would take over 30 years to get the money back let alone turn a profit.