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It will take a new generation of kids to come through, which is why we need to give free tickets away to encourage them….
Am I right in thinking that away fans have to be charged the same as home fans? In which case, if we let home kids in for nowt, don’t we have to do the same with away kids?[/quote]
Yes your right but there is a catch to it. You can only charge the same in the away end as the home end so for instance for the visit of Man Utd, Liverpool etc the club could make a section of seats in the Wigan end about £40 then they can charge United about £40. Basically you cant make the away price more than the home price.
Has for the article it is a bit misleading. It actually is going of the top price paid so most of these clubs could have had a shed load of season tickets the same price as ours its just the premium seats that has cost so much. Take for instance Blackburn they had a load at £249 making it a pound cheaper than us and my mate at work paid (i think) £179 the catch to this one is that it is in the away stand. For the visit of all clubs apart from City, United and Liverpool he sits in the sectioned off side next to the away fans. When they open up all the stand to away fans then he has to buy a ticket else where in the ground but does get first shout on one before they go on general sale.
1) The decision in the summer of 1996 to hoik up the matchday ticket prices to as much as £35 under the excuse that “this is what most other clubs charge”. I think just at the time that Latics following had reached unprecedented levels & could have kicked on that this knocked a good couple of thousand off our regular attendance & it killed the upward momentum in crowds stone dead. Both myself & the contractor knew directly of people who had started to come in that first premier league season who just turned round & flatly refused to pay the much of a price hike – and they’ve never been back.
Sorry, can’t agree. Although I agree with what you say about ticket prices in 1996 (though surely you mean 2006?) the fact remains that today they are comparatively ridiculously cheap and anyone who doesn’t come because they used to be expensive is, quite frankly in my book, fishing for an excuse.
That’s like saying I’m not buying a laptop for £400 because they used to be £2000.[/quote]
i think I meant 2006 – I’m so tired at the moment that I can’t quite remember!!!
Anyway, back to the subject – I agree, comparatively, Latics prices are very cheap for top flight football in this country & the season ticket & the season ticket packages they do are unbelievably good deals
BUT I don’t think you can disagree that it had an effect at the time. People had caught the Latics bug & were looking at coming back & there was an unjustifiable increase in the price & a large chunk of that new following disappeared. Once someone has stopped going to the match & they start to do or go back to doing other things on a Saturday afternoon its very hard to persuade them to come back as I think is proving the case
Yes its an excuse but the club gave it to them2) The decision made by Whelan in January 2009 to order Steve Bruce to dismantle his team, the public declaration that “all our players are available” and the further declarations that “we’ve achieved our sole aim of staying up we need to get the funds in now to build up next season’s squad” & the less than subtle insinuation that that would be our sole aim from then on in. Again, excitement was building up, Latics were 7th & looking good for a possible challenge for Europe, everyone started talking about the next level, other clubs, fans & even the media were praising our players & (IMO) we were playing some decent stuff.
In one fell swoop it crushed alot of people’s ambitions for the club (as unrealistic as they may have been), turned some former regulars away & so I assume turned any new punters away. Who wants to follow a club with no ambition??[/i][/size]
I am prepared to bow to your superior memory but I do not recall Whelan saying that “all our players are available” and if even if he did, when did we start believing what Whelan says?
And again, I don’t know for a fact (but neither, probably, does anyone else on this forum) but I believe that Heskey wanted to go when he did and would have gone for nothing in the summer anyway and, presumably, the Tottenham money was on the table at the time that Palacios left and that Palacios himself wanted to go then. As you say, Valencia stayed until the summer.
Back to the point of ambition, where do these ‘fans’ who say the club lacks ambition realistically think we could/should be?
Having seen the club accounts as we all have, because they’ve been posted or alluded to numerous times on this forum in recent times, what would be the financial state of the club now had we not raked in around £2m(?) for Heskey, £12 for Palacios and £16m for Valencia?[/quote]
To be fair in my original post I didn’t make any effort to put Whelan’s words into context & it was very much along the lines of “we are Wigan Athletic if we want to continue in this division for a long time we have to sell our players to raise the funds to bring in new ones. As such everybody at the club is for sale for the right price”
I agree with that, everybody knows that & knew it at the time but I think to publicly come out with comments like that, at that particular moment in time, sent out all the wrong messages to other clubs, to other potential signings & to the public in generalI’m surprised though that you missed the point regarding the sale of Heskey & Palacios.
The point I made was that there was no need to sell them when they did.
Yes Heskey would have gone for nowt in the summer but at the time he was sold Latics were 7th. At the end of the season they’d dropped to 11th – that was a loss in prize money of somewhere between £2m-£3m & was roughly what the club made from selling him. Now the drop in form may well have happened anyway without the sales of 2 of our key players (although i doubt it would have been as bad). The club could have taken a gamble & wound up in roughly the same financial position but been seen to the Wigan public to show some ambitionWith regard to Palacios my point was again not about us selling him but about the timing of it. I know we had to sell him to give the club a sounder financial footing. It could have waited till the summer
can’t beleive all these ‘reasons’. some do add to the problem of course.
but THE main reason is…………….
football live in pubs.
simple. :roll:But its not. If you ever go in pubs when Latics are on you will find that they are hardly teaming with thousands of fans across the Town. Our kid works in pub in standish which shows games and she says if Latics are in they turn it off and put United/Liverpool on!
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