I've woken up this morning feeling a little depressed, due in large part to events yesterday at the Valley. Scraping a draw against non-league opposition at home would probably be enough to depress anyone but it was the embarrassment of our home gate and the lack of any home atmosphere that hurt more.
The gate given was 8682 which meant approximately 5600 Charlton fans scattered around 24,000 seats. The top tier of the West was closed which at least made the concentration in the lower tier look a bit better. The Covered End was woeful and even the singers in the top tier were huddled together in the central block. I couldn't see the East as I was in it but it was dire around me and the few regular faces who were there raised their eyebrows in acknowledgement that it was a poor showing. Our visitors were clearly perplexed and you could forgive them for their view of "we've got more fans than you." When you combine that with the fact that they largely bossed the game, "football league - you're having a laugh" was a pretty obvious song.
We are actually averaging 15,382 in the league but many of these gates are boosted by absent season-ticket holders, so the gates look a good bit worse at the match. Tuesday's game against Bristol Rovers was a prime example. In our defence, we have just played four successive home games and it was freezing cold yesterday, but 5,000 home fans is pretty much close to our die-hard, watch paint-dry, Valley following. This was the F A Cup after all and whilst the opposition were non-league, it was Luton Town and not Northwich Victoria. If you consider that it was only a tenner to get in yesterday and a fiver for concessions, I think you have to acknowledge that we attracted hardly any neutrals or walk-up interest, something that used to have a key contribution to gates at football matches.
I am left with the conclusion that our league home gates are actually much better than perhaps we have a right to expect purely based on the football we are playing and our league position. The club obviously understand this, which is why they target renewals so effectively each year.
It doesn't help that we have not played particularly well at home all season and are having to scrap to get results. I believe our league position is false based upon the quality of the football I have seen at the Valley so far. Based on yesterday's gate, I suspect many of our fans feel the same.
We are averaging a couple of hundred more than Palace as things stand, and whilst our season-ticket base is probably close to better than Millwall's average gate of 11,300, I suspect Palace will pip us before the season finishes.
Perhaps there is no easy answer to this conundrum beyond Phil Parkinson managing to improve the quality of the product on offer at home. Strong, free-flowing and winning football is compelling to watch and is the best advertisement we have for attracting fans and encouraging newcomers to return. Perhaps our efforts over the last four years have been counter-productive because of four lean years and our tendency to under-perform on the big occasion?
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They actually started singing what's it like to share a ground??????
ReplyDeleteI don't agree that the club targets season ticket renewals effectively. I stopped buying my season ticket two seasons ago after 40 odd years. I was never contacted again by the club after failing to return my renewal form. Nobody from the club sent a reminder or email or endeavoured to find out why I had not renewed.
ReplyDeleteWith a bit of encouiragement or some attempt at negotialtion by the club I may well have been persuaded to continue but the club obviously didn't care
Anon - I didn't hear that one but very good!
ReplyDeleteDave S - what I meant be "effectively" is how they manage to pitch the offer and timing well emough to have secured the numbers we have in the past couple of seasons. I don't think there's a strong argument that the 10,000 we managed to re-secure this year was very good for League One. we will be lucky to get 7,000 next year if we don't get out of this division...
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting piece. I reckon that there are two forces at work. First, supporters have progressively lost interest in the FA Cup over the last 10-20 years whilst league games have, in contrast, become relatively much more important. It would have been unheard of 20 years ago for a team to rest players in cup ties but now it is common place, at all levels [I know Charlton didn’t do that yesterday]. There are probably lots of reasons for this. Amongst them must be the much higher stakes now attached to promotion and relegation which, combined with the play-off system, ensures that many league games are now seen as “must win” for both sides. By contrast, today’s society isn’t really interested in inevitable failure and this is, of course, exactly what the FA Cup means for a club like Charlton.
ReplyDeleteThe second factor is that watching football is habit forming. I’ve been watching football for over 50 years, but when my family was very young I got out of the habit and, as result, rarely went. I’ve been back in the habit for many years now and it makes a huge difference. I went yesterday, but when out of the habit I’d never have given it a moment’s thought. Today being in or out of the habit has even more inertia than it used to because you can’t just turn up and find a place on the terrace you’d like to see the game from. Regulars buy season tickets and this reinforces their habit; you’ve paid so you may as well go. But for the “roll-up” supporter it’s much harder. It requires planning. You need to queue for a ticket at the ticket office etc. This dynamic is exacerbated for the FA Cup because, unlike in the “old days”, season tickets do not include cup matches. Even season ticket holders, therefore, face a certain hassle in securing tickets and those that go to league games because “they’ve bought a season ticket” probably decide to take the day off. This may seem a real paradox [and its certainly a digression], but I’m sure that many more season ticket holders would have gone yesterday had their season ticket included cup ties [at the same price] than had the club announced that admission was free.
The key for Charlton is to keep people in the habit and to get new people into the habit. In theory, attractive football would help, but nowhere near as much as success and promotion. Only then will the balance of those “getting the habit” v those “losing the habit” be favourable. Until then the “regular” support will likely continue to decline. The path of that decline is probably asymptotic to some true underlying “core”, but that core is almost certainly a long way from today’s average. Given all of this the club is right to do everything it possibly can to maximise season ticket sales. It’s about much more than the money.
Good post, Dave, with some very interesting responses/comments.
ReplyDeleteAs for Saturday, it was the "your grounds too big for you" chant that cut through me the most.
Anon made a very valid point regarding the 'habit' of going (or not, as the case may be) to football matches. Clearly Charlton's problem this season has been too many of the occasional fans have collectively found something else to do. Considering our record in cup comps and the artic temperatures it's hard to be too critical.
My personal view is the Brighton defeat was far more damaging than we could have predicted at the time. To some, it may well have been the 'straw that broke the camels back'. Although the team have done very well since, Mr. Occasional may take a bit more persuading that Charlton are worthy of the time, money and effort once again. On a plus point, if we get passed Christmas and we're still in the top 6, then I think gates will improve.
As for me, my ethos is simple: if Charlton are at home, I will be at The Valley. But before I over-stretch to pat myself on the back, if I'm honest, I can't say I enjoyed the experience on Saturday one bit. I've used the term many times before, but games like Saturday are to be endured rather than enjoyed when you're an Addick!
But then compare my home views with that of away matches and all of a sudden I become Mr. Occasional. This season I've only been to one away game V's L/Orient, and looking at the fixture list, I'm not planning anything away soon. Compare that with last season, where I went to 9 games away from home, and made considerable more effort to do so. Why? Cost, time away from my young family and work all play a hefty factor, but perhaps it's also that sometimes I just want a break from Charlton every now and again.
We are a club in the third division playing third division footblall. At this stage it is much more important that we win rather than play in an attractive way and lose.
ReplyDeleteI can guarantee that if we stay in the top two we will attract larger crowds the longer the season goes on, the reason is that everybody wants to see a winning team. Ten games without defeat is a major success for Parkinson, and would eb at any level. Remember, we only have to be marginally better than the teams we play, and apart from Brighton we mainly have been.
Ted,
ReplyDeleteJust be grateful you didn't go to Brentford. It was the pits and gave me the resolve not to go away again until New Year. I relented for the bore-draw at Barnet but I won't go back to Griffin Park and Luton in the week is a no-no (both on telly). Rochdale has been tempting but Saturdays' performance cooled the ardour and the snow's killed it. Maybe it will be 2011.
Dave
Dave
ReplyDeleteI think the club has got its matchday pricing badly wrong when it insisted 23 match-by-match tickets would cost considerably more than an equivalent season ticket.
There's no reason for this relationship to hold. As 'Anonymous' implies, a season ticket confers many benefits over and above a guaranteed seat (lack of hassle; away ticket priority etc.).
For a game like Walsall (unattractive opposition just before Xmas), they should be opening up the lower North and the wings of the East for £5 adult tickets. This would boost the atmosphere, potentially attract occasional fans to attend more often, and probably have little if any negative impact on total matchday revenue (particularly once other spending is taken into account eg. programmes, food etc.).
Instead they attempted a messy compromise against Yeovil (cheap tickets but only if introduced by a season ticket holder), and the poor attendance suggests it failed.
The FA Cup is dying a slow death however, so I think the poor showing on Saturday mainly reflects that as well as non-League opposition (if we'd been playing Crawley instead of Luton, I suspect no-one would have concluded the crowd was surprisingly low).