Re: minor cup games

By SteveHFC (legacy user)4/10/2014 00:19Sat Oct 4 00:19:28 2014In response to minor cup games

Views: 5476

First of all - my reply with my "club official" hat on.

Yes we are allowed (certainly in county cup, not sure about league cup), but it's a bit of a catch 22 situation as we still need to try and cover our costs - match officials, hospitality etc. Under the various competition rules we have to offer a certain level of hospitality to the match officials and opponents.

Reducing the prices won't entice enough additional people to make up the shortfall unfortunately, and whilst I can't speak for the board, I know that in years gone by this is the main why we generally haven't dropped the prices for the minor cups.

As a simple example, if we charge £10 and get 50 people paying, we get £500 gate income. If we cut prices by 50% - we would need to double our gate to 100 to match the £500 income. We all know that's not going to happen. If we charged £7, we'd need to get an extra 20 people, that's a 40% increase in numbers attending (70 at £7 = £490), and I'm not confident we'd manage that.

Also, in those competitions where we have to split the gate with our opponents (I don't know off the top of my head which ones this applies to other than the two FA competitions) we have to agree the admission fees with our opponents.

Now my reply with my "supporter" hat on.

Personally, and putting aside the maths above, I think we should do something about lowering prices for the minor cups - to be charging £10 for a London Senior Cup tie is utter lunacy when many Football League clubs only charge £10 for Capital One Cup ties, especially when we all know, given the FA Cup tie on the following Saturday, it's likely to be a side featuring the squad players that we are fielding.

I don't know if I've mentioned it on here before, I probably have, and I know I've mentioned it on other forums, I think the cost to get into football at our level, and those higher than us, is overpriced - and has been for many years, especially given the cost of travel these days, whether we travel by car, coach or train.

And as for St Albans charging £15 in the division above - that's just complete insanity!

Be interesting to know from others whether the admission price for the minor cups (Middx, London & League Cups) stops them for coming, or whether they'd come regardless.

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