There's probably enough words on this topic in the ether but what's the harm in a few more? So, here goes...
The club recently released season ticket and match day pricing. The reaction was clear. Fan groups, podcasts, message board posters, local radio coverage and individuals on social media expressed a clear sense that the structure wasn't right. There was a strong concern for how this would impact on particular groups. Those groups - families, young people and children are the groups which are essential for the long term stability of the club.
Since then, we've seen two interviews with the CEO where it appears clear that the concerns of the supporters are not to be listened to. To my mind, nothing I've seen gives me confidence that the idea of growth over time and building the fan base to support long term sustainability is the continuing goal of the club.
If those are not the goals, then I'd like to know what the goals are - because in order to be more than we are we need to achieve the above. If the club is to become sustainable at this level or higher, then we need more people coming through the gates. If the club is to even maintain it's current financial performance then we need to ensure that we keep generating new fans as time has a nasty habit of ensuring no supporter stays in their seat forever.
The key question is: does charging more for young people to attend football matches help us achieve these goals? According to the CEO himself, the 'young people and children' impacted by the price rises and band changes are a very small part of the total support. That begs an obvious question - why bother increasing their prices? Lets say there's 500 kids now paying £50 more - that's £25,000. That's really not a lot of money at all. That's essentially the cost for a whole lot of very bad PR.
The knock on issue is that small immediate gain (based on a flawed assumption that all the parents renew all the current kids season tickets at higher cost) becomes a long term loss as those kids are the full price fans of the next decade and every kid who doesn't renew or who doesn't get taken in the first place is a long term negative financial impact when they don't follow the club in adulthood. The CEO may very well not be there in a decade, but we will (and even if we aren't, we'll want the club to be)
Those same kids are also the one of the 'key drivers' of secondary spend. It's them who want the shirt, the £3.60 bag of sweets, the ludicrously marked up bottle of pop and the tacky Bloomfield Bear pencil case. It's also, in some cases, them that drive the adults to go, forcing granddad, mum, next door neighbour or whoever to take them. For every kids ticket there's an adult ticket and perhaps a pint or a pie and so on.
Similar arguments apply to the 14-18 and 18-22 brackets. They're the people who will drag in mates, they're the people who will turn 'going to the match' into a thing their group of mates do. The idea of the club as 'something to do' on a Saturday is important. It's a hook. There's millions of other things to do for this age group (not least the draw of Premier League football on a fire stick or FIFA on a console) and we should never take for granted that people will just come 'because the club is there'
5 years ago, we were sold a vision - that vision was of a club that would do things the right way. The families that sit around me are good people. They're not 'entitled' and they don't expect things for free. They pay (and have in many cases for many years) the price to watch what is very often quite poor football. A sudden and in some price brackets, drastic, increase puts them in a difficult situation. There seems to be limited understanding of this from the club and the blunt response that 'cost of living effects us all' seems at best tone deaf and at worst, actually quite provocative.
As a fan base, Blackpool fans can be demanding. This isn't a 'normal' football club and I don't envy those who have to deal with us sometimes. There's a particular sense of ownership or stewardship that this fan base feels for reason that are obvious. Sometimes that must be challenging - but in this instance, what is being expressed is something fundamental - this club is something we believe in, it's something we love and it's something that has to be for everyone and for the town and in particular, for the kids and young people and families that will be the lifeblood of the future.
These prices literally don't affect me (my ticket is a £20 rise, which is ok in the context of inflation and my lad isn't impacted by the banding changes) and they won't affect many people expressing discontent. The club can stick its heels in and deny there's an issue but doing so is going to take us into a new season with an unresolved black cloud hanging over everyone and everything.
The club is always keen to utilise the fan base in its marketing. The 'product' it sells is often the idea of being in and amongst a packed North stand in the midst of the chanting and bouncing passion. That atmosphere derives at least in part from who and what we are as a fan base. That is created in no small part by the recent history of the club but also, in no small part by the fact there's a lot of younger fans in that part of the ground.
The club can either harness that or reject it - but by doing the latter, it will be chucking in the bin an enormous and unique selling point for the 'product' it is seeking to sell. That atmosphere will not be generated by a fan base that is resentful of the fact the board haven't even had the foresight to run pricing by any of the fan groups.
In a town where so much of the infrastructure is for outsiders and there are obvious and well documented economic challenges, getting young people into the football ground and feeling a sense of identification and belonging with something local is really the basic foundation stone of building a club that serves a purpose in relation to its community.
That might seem high minded but that was the stated intent of the ownership when they took over. Fast forward 5 and a bit years and when the CEO of the club makes a direct comparison between the once a year holiday maker focused attractions and their prices and the weekly commitment of supporting the local football team (who also, aren't necessarily offering a 'world class' product with a cast iron guarantee of a positive experience - which many of the other attractions are) - it feels as if there's a fundamental lack of local acumen and as if the original goal has been long forgotten.
That might seem high minded but that was the stated intent of the ownership when they took over. Fast forward 5 and a bit years and when the CEO of the club makes a direct comparison between the once a year holiday maker focused attractions and their prices and the weekly commitment of supporting the local football team (who also, aren't necessarily offering a 'world class' product with a cast iron guarantee of a positive experience - which many of the other attractions are) - it feels as if there's a fundamental lack of local acumen and as if the original goal has been long forgotten.
Whilst it's clearly the remit of the club to charge whatever prices it thinks are right, we're left as a fan base wondering what the hell the strategy now is. The CEO has issued a vague comment about price rises supporting the development of the team but when we look at the numbers that just doesn't seem to add up. The gains made don't seem significant at all. Developing a squad costs serious money - the gains made on kids prices (and as we've established already, this is by the CEO's own admission) won't bring in big name players or pay their wages. The maths simply don't add up.
I'm not a marketing executive. I'm not a 'football expert' either - but it seems fairly clear that we're pitching the 'product' to a market in a way that doesn't make sense. The match day mark-up is steep and isn't going to attract walk on support in a town where a lot of employment is low paid and precarious and thus 'going when you can' is an important option. The kids and young adult prices are significantly less attractive than they were. People have less money in their pockets than they previously did and the club is actually at a lower ebb than it was when the pricing was lower.
None of this (to my untrained eye) adds up to a long term approach designed around our circumstances and our location. It is clear that the owner does support the club financially and if he wants to step back from that to some degree, then that is his business, not mine - but it isn't clear to me how charging these prices impacts that in a meaningful way. In fact, I'd argue that over time, it could threaten the ambition to achieve sustainability.
Commercially speaking, I'd also imagine that a club with a positive story to tell about its role in the community and a growing fan base of young people would be a better sell to sponsors and various partners than one without the above. Again, I'm not an expert in such things but generally I'd imagine that businesses want a positive atmosphere to be associated with their products and services and I'm left wondering how the tiny gains made from hiking the prices for kids will be reflected in other ways on the balance sheet by sponsorship and partnership opportunities not forthcoming. Terry from Terry's Carpets and his ilk don't want to chuck money into a hole - they want something in return and that return can really only be the positive vibes that come with your brand being associated with something people love.
I don't want this piece to become vitriolic. There's plenty of passionate, strong words elsewhere - but in the interview with the CEO there was something incredibly irritating (that's the polite version) in hearing about the 'alignment' between 'Critch,' David Downes and the CEO about the job they had to do at a point where the club itself seems to have spectacularly misaligned itself in terms of its relationship with the most important group of people involved with any football club - the supporters.
There's something kind of uncomfortable about listening to self congratulatory back slapping between highly paid individuals when the only reason those people have a highly lucrative job in the first place is because there's a football club to give them it. The only reason there is a football club is because there are enough people who are willing to hand over a proportion of their income every week to watch that football club. The less the club seems to value the people who do that, the less the people who do that will be tempted to keep handing their cash over - and the less rope they'll be inclined to give the club when it makes (as is inevitable in football) mistakes or experiences a challenging time.
In short - the club has got all the evidence it could ever have that it has made a mistake in its pricing structure. It can listen to a highly paid consultancy firm who have no skin in the game and seem to have mistaken Blackpool FC for a club with no empty seats and a stream of wealthier fans waiting outside to snap up tickets - or it can listen to the core support, the 'customer base' upon which it relies and without which, it can achieve nothing. It can harness an army of people who, if the club can move slightly on prices, will be keen to evangelise and market the tangerine cause (for no cost) to anyone who will listen, or it can start the season at odds with that same group in a fog of discontent and with a sense that things are sliding in a direction no one really wants to go in.
It's up to them.
Onward!
I don't want this piece to become vitriolic. There's plenty of passionate, strong words elsewhere - but in the interview with the CEO there was something incredibly irritating (that's the polite version) in hearing about the 'alignment' between 'Critch,' David Downes and the CEO about the job they had to do at a point where the club itself seems to have spectacularly misaligned itself in terms of its relationship with the most important group of people involved with any football club - the supporters.
There's something kind of uncomfortable about listening to self congratulatory back slapping between highly paid individuals when the only reason those people have a highly lucrative job in the first place is because there's a football club to give them it. The only reason there is a football club is because there are enough people who are willing to hand over a proportion of their income every week to watch that football club. The less the club seems to value the people who do that, the less the people who do that will be tempted to keep handing their cash over - and the less rope they'll be inclined to give the club when it makes (as is inevitable in football) mistakes or experiences a challenging time.
In short - the club has got all the evidence it could ever have that it has made a mistake in its pricing structure. It can listen to a highly paid consultancy firm who have no skin in the game and seem to have mistaken Blackpool FC for a club with no empty seats and a stream of wealthier fans waiting outside to snap up tickets - or it can listen to the core support, the 'customer base' upon which it relies and without which, it can achieve nothing. It can harness an army of people who, if the club can move slightly on prices, will be keen to evangelise and market the tangerine cause (for no cost) to anyone who will listen, or it can start the season at odds with that same group in a fog of discontent and with a sense that things are sliding in a direction no one really wants to go in.
It's up to them.
Onward!
If you want to waste your money supporting a cheeky twat who asks if you'd like to spare some in return for absolutely nothing you wouldn't get anyway, you can do so here.
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