From local Bolton Journalist Neil Bonnar. He makes some good points here.
IT appears to have been beyond the intelligence of football clubs for many years that the average fan struggles to afford match tickets.
If a family man is on £25,000 a year - and very many are on much less - he loses £5,000 right away on income tax.
Take away the £100 a week shopping bill (£5,000 a year), the same in household bills and £2,000 in national insurance and pension deductions and that's another £12,000 a year gone and brings his spending money down to £8,000.
Most people have various loans to pay back, such as on a car or household appliances, so let's take off another £2,000 a year which leaves us with £6,000 a year to spend.
We all like a foreign holiday, which costs around £3,000 all in for a family of four, so we finish up with an annual expendible income of £3,000 a year, which is £250 a month, or £65 a week.
That's £65 a week to buy clothes, go to the pub, take your wife out and pay for the kids' hobbies.
And then football clubs come along and demand £35 a ticket for you and another £15 for your son.
It's nothing short of a disgrace perpetrated by the custodians of what is laughingly still spoken of as "the people's game".
Actually, football clubs have known these maths all along. They just haven't cared.
That is until the hardship stopped affecting their supporters and started affecting them when their crowds dropped.
A lot of fans have had enough of paying through the nose and switched to watching games in the many pubs which, thankfully, show them on the cheap.
Some people think that pubs showing matches via weird and wonderful television stations is illegal. Well, a number of landlords have been taken to court over it recently and won the case.
The upshot for the game is smaller crowds and panicking clubs. Blackburn are one of the worst hit by falling crowds and they have done something wonderfully dramatic which is going to affect both their, and Bolton Wanderers', supporters this weekend.
They have cut the cost of tickets for Sunday's Premiership derby match at Ewood Park by more than double, charging adults £15 and kids and OAPs just £5.
And, guess what, the fans are falling over themselves to go to the match.
Wanderers sold out their allocation of 5,600 tickets in double quick time and another 1,500 have been made available for them to buy on the day. It's like the good old days.
By Thursday, at least 3,500 more tickets had been sold for the match than attended the same fixture last season.
So, cheap tickets fill grounds. Surprise, surprise.
Blackburn's last two games, both derbies against Manchester City and Wigan for which tickets were charged at the normal full price, attracted just 18,000 fans.
The rush for tickets to see Sunday's game proves there is still a big appetite to watch football as long as it is affordable.
It will be very interesting to see the attendance figure against Bolton, which I suspect will be enough to break even on their cut-price venture.
But, whatever the figure, there'll be cracking atmosphere and Rovers will get the benefit of much goodwill from both sets of fans - and from the wives who can be taken out by their husbands with the £30 they are saving on the ticket price.
PS... Latest ticket news is that we could be taking more than 8000 to Blackburn on Sunday Fookinell
And City havn't sold their allocation for the Wigan game cos Wigan have upped their prices FFS
__________________
Some excellent points made by a journo who knows the score
IT appears to have been beyond the intelligence of football clubs for many years that the average fan struggles to afford match tickets.
If a family man is on £25,000 a year - and very many are on much less - he loses £5,000 right away on income tax.
Take away the £100 a week shopping bill (£5,000 a year), the same in household bills and £2,000 in national insurance and pension deductions and that's another £12,000 a year gone and brings his spending money down to £8,000.
Most people have various loans to pay back, such as on a car or household appliances, so let's take off another £2,000 a year which leaves us with £6,000 a year to spend.
We all like a foreign holiday, which costs around £3,000 all in for a family of four, so we finish up with an annual expendible income of £3,000 a year, which is £250 a month, or £65 a week.
That's £65 a week to buy clothes, go to the pub, take your wife out and pay for the kids' hobbies.
And then football clubs come along and demand £35 a ticket for you and another £15 for your son.
It's nothing short of a disgrace perpetrated by the custodians of what is laughingly still spoken of as "the people's game".
Actually, football clubs have known these maths all along. They just haven't cared.
That is until the hardship stopped affecting their supporters and started affecting them when their crowds dropped.
A lot of fans have had enough of paying through the nose and switched to watching games in the many pubs which, thankfully, show them on the cheap.
Some people think that pubs showing matches via weird and wonderful television stations is illegal. Well, a number of landlords have been taken to court over it recently and won the case.
The upshot for the game is smaller crowds and panicking clubs. Blackburn are one of the worst hit by falling crowds and they have done something wonderfully dramatic which is going to affect both their, and Bolton Wanderers', supporters this weekend.
They have cut the cost of tickets for Sunday's Premiership derby match at Ewood Park by more than double, charging adults £15 and kids and OAPs just £5.
And, guess what, the fans are falling over themselves to go to the match.
Wanderers sold out their allocation of 5,600 tickets in double quick time and another 1,500 have been made available for them to buy on the day. It's like the good old days.
By Thursday, at least 3,500 more tickets had been sold for the match than attended the same fixture last season.
So, cheap tickets fill grounds. Surprise, surprise.
Blackburn's last two games, both derbies against Manchester City and Wigan for which tickets were charged at the normal full price, attracted just 18,000 fans.
The rush for tickets to see Sunday's game proves there is still a big appetite to watch football as long as it is affordable.
It will be very interesting to see the attendance figure against Bolton, which I suspect will be enough to break even on their cut-price venture.
But, whatever the figure, there'll be cracking atmosphere and Rovers will get the benefit of much goodwill from both sets of fans - and from the wives who can be taken out by their husbands with the £30 they are saving on the ticket price.
PS... Latest ticket news is that we could be taking more than 8000 to Blackburn on Sunday Fookinell
And City havn't sold their allocation for the Wigan game cos Wigan have upped their prices FFS
__________________
Some excellent points made by a journo who knows the score
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