Re: stadium party - a cock for loyal fans
I am growing more and more cynical so it is completely possibly that I am talking bollocks (first person to just quote that bit with a poor bit of sarcasm wins the Oscar Wilde Award), but I could easily be convinced that this whole thing has been another cynical attempt to make money and 'expand the brand'.
There is absolutely no way that Stoke gave a shit whether City had the trophy out on Tuesday. The fans would have been half way home and the team would have been in the showers. They are not 5 year olds, they would have just got on with it. The 'respect for Stoke' line is a complete red herring imo.
What it does do though is create demand to see the team with the cup on home soil.
So why not just give single tickets to fans on Tues evening. I doubt very much it is because they are terrified of TV pictures showing a half full ground. It would be a Monday evening, without any actual football, after the cup has been on parade through town. No-one would bat an eyelid if only 10,000 hardy souls were in the ground for another lap of honour or whatever is going on.
Much more likely is that they are desperate to get as near to 40,000 there for the potential revenue that their spending will bring on the night. Hence the desperation to get as many tickets as possible into the fairweather fan/possibly not even a fan market. In fact, the person who rarely visits the ground is much more likely to be spending a wedge on Monday, as they make a rare visit and get caught up in cup fever, than the bloke who is there every fortnight.
No doubt they will expect the bars, square, car park (yep, even that has a huge profit margin for the club now, thanks to a very cynical decision at the end of last season) and store to do a roaring trade. And it isn't the regulars who are going to be doing the bulk of that spending. It's the kids that rarely get there and the equivalent of day trippers.
It also nicely serves the trick of attracting more fair weather fans, trading on the cup and the giddy atmosphere in the hope that they now 'become' City fans.
I am probably talking bollocks, as the season ticket stuff is just the latest in a long line of events that makes me uber-cynical about Cook and his motives, but I can see a very convincing argument that this event is all about generating revenue (both immediate and delayed, long term) and specifically designed to get a large amount of non-regular, therefore more likely to spend, through the door - mixing with regulars. And if that means many regulars missing out, who cares.
I think I am in danger of becoming a conspiracy theorist here but this very strange event and the way distribution has been handled - along with the very odd refusal to show the cup on Tues - just seems to have been organised by a complete idiot otherwise. And I don't believe that things are being decided by complete idiots.
