Red Faction - Ticket Price Statement

Alexander Supertramp said:
Your calcs = back of a fag packet

The clubs calcs = years of data on consumer habits / income / expenditure etc
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You give them way too much credit. The football club is actually a tiny business. Football itself is a multi billion pound industry but Middlesbrough FC is tiny. It's run by one bloke, has about £30m turnover and employs only 200 people. It is clear that the way they run things like the club shop and ticketing is very amateur.

I would be shocked to find out that the ticket pricing model is more than just a spreadsheet knocked up by the finance team. There definitely isn't a team of analysts like Amazon or Tesco would have working on complex models.
 
Nano said:
You give them way too much credit. The football club is actually a tiny business. Football itself is a multi billion pound industry but Middlesbrough FC is tiny. It's run by one bloke, has about £30m turnover and employs only 200 people. It is clear that the way they run things like the club shop and ticketing is very amateur.

I would be shocked to find out that the ticket pricing model is more than just a spreadsheet knocked up by the finance team. There definitely isn't a team of analysts like Amazon or Tesco would have working on complex models.
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You’re probably right but why would a tiny business (your words) operate at such a high performing commercial level like Amazon etc?
 
Glover_elbow said:
These season ticket holders are dying and not being replaced the average age demographic is as old as it is on here. It makes no sense to price out young casual fans from attending matches
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The RF aren’t old are they? I’d like to see stats on this.

All the people on the boro breakdown telegram group seem to be in their 20s, many of them go home and away without fail. This board doesn’t reflect the entire fan base.
 
atypical_boro said:
You’re probably right but why would a tiny business (your words) operate at such a high performing commercial level like Amazon etc?
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They wouldn't. That's my point. The post I was quoting was making it sound like the club has a complex ticketing model and loads of experts working on it but it doesn't. There's no chance in hell that they have the optimal ticketing structure to maximise revenue and attendance.

Going back to the music examples above. They can charge those values because they know that people will pay them. They sell out comfortably and they also sell again on resell sites so they know how many people are willing to pay if they increase the price by 2x. I can guarantee we don't. We don't have the data because we don't sell out and we haven't tried anything else. If we doubled our ticket price would we lose half our season ticket holders? I would be pretty confident that we wouldn't maybe a third of them. If we put the prices up by 50% to £30 per game I think we'd lose 10-20% which means more money coming in.

The club seem to base all their ticketing decisions on when support was dwindling due to a massive shift in the clubs fortunes. We went from UEFA cup finalists to rooted in the championship so that is why we were losing fans. Cheaper tickets didn't bring people back because the football was terrible. Our ticket sales are mostly reflective of the team's performance which is why I think we can charge season ticket holders more to increase revenue. Season ticket holders are more price inelastic than walk-ups.
 
Nano said:
They wouldn't. That's my point. The post I was quoting was making it sound like the club has a complex ticketing model and loads of experts working on it but it doesn't. There's no chance in hell that they have the optimal ticketing structure to maximise revenue and attendance.

Going back to the music examples above. They can charge those values because they know that people will pay them. They sell out comfortably and they also sell again on resell sites so they know how many people are willing to pay if they increase the price by 2x. I can guarantee we don't. We don't have the data because we don't sell out and we haven't tried anything else. If we doubled our ticket price would we lose half our season ticket holders? I would be pretty confident that we wouldn't maybe a third of them. If we put the prices up by 50% to £30 per game I think we'd lose 10-20% which means more money coming in.

The club seem to base all their ticketing decisions on when support was dwindling due to a massive shift in the clubs fortunes. We went from UEFA cup finalists to rooted in the championship so that is why we were losing fans. Cheaper tickets didn't bring people back because the football was terrible. Our ticket sales are mostly reflective of the team's performance which is why I think we can charge season ticket holders more to increase revenue. Season ticket holders are more price inelastic than walk-ups.
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They don’t all sell out tho, I mean what you want is 99.99% sell out then you know you’ve got it right, if Beyoncé sells out and tickets are changing hands on the black market, that basically means they’ve underpriced. But Beyoncé might not logistically be able to do 4 nights in Edinburgh even though she could sell out Murrayfield four times over or whatever. The maximised revenue of the whole tour is the objective.

Tough task making sure every match sells out to 100% capacity. But in any case it’s about revenue not capacity, the club don’t care if the stadium is full or not. If they could charge 300 people £100,000 a ticket they’d do that.
 
Glover_elbow said:
These season ticket holders are dying and not being replaced the average age demographic is as old as it is on here. It makes no sense to price out young casual fans from attending matches
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You’re guessing, football is more popular than it has ever been, there will always be fans through the turnstiles and there is more now than ever. I’m 33 and know plenty my age and younger who go. Of course season ticket holders die but they are always replaced.
 
Even if season ticket holders were all dying off and the demographics aging, rises would level off over time such that they continued to be replaced.

Back in the mid-90s when the club was booming, every week there was a lengthy debate on the Three Legends about how the club needed to think about the future generations and ticket prices etc or the ground would be empty in 10 years etc. Nearly thirty years later attendances are basically the same (give or take) and prices haven’t gone down once (but for the occasional special offer).

Attendances have dropped when we’ve been crap, and that’s because plenty of people (understandably) don’t want to pay £30 to watch us lose to Preston or whoever. Imagine the uproar if the club introduced true elasticity where every time they won the ticket price went up by a quid 😁. When we’re sustainably good, prices will go up, it’s a commercial world.

I have a ticket stub from Boxing Day 2000, £29. You can get in for that now can’t you, 23 years later? The really steep rises happened in the late 90s when football recovered from hooliganism etc and had its growth spurt post euro96. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Those of us who coughed up those prices back then (and continue to do so to this day) have all played our own small part in this, and in helping to price people out etc so we really shouldn’t be too self-righteous about it imo.
 
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JM14 said:
No one’s claiming it should be charity but some business sense should come into it, charging more for any product than the majority of your competitors in an area with the worst financial issues in the entire country inevitably means the take up will be lower and that’s what’s happening with us. We have thousands of empty seats in the ground which we would likely sell if it was actually affordable. Supporters who would come back year after year, spend money in the ground/shop etc

No one has been able to justify why we already charge more than most clubs in the league
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It’s not really about justification, it’s about explaining it commercially. Middlesbrough is a football only town with next to no interest in any other sport, and has very little else by way of entertainment compared to many other towns. It is also quite far away from other big towns.

The fact is that rising ticket prices have rarely impacted attendances negatively because the club only implement rises on the rare occasions that the team are doing consistently well. Teessiders care more about football than most other areas of the UK (not all), the club exploits this and always will.

If you want “moral” justification you won’t get it, it doesn’t exist. Football doesn’t operate like that, most commercial markets don’t. The club is a commercial entity.
 
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Chappy112 said:
Why doesn't it matter? People are saying we need to increase the prices to compete but we already bring in as much money as most other clubs, if we can't compete on that then something is fundamentally wrong at the club.
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I think it’s widely accepted now that there is. The club owes Gibson a shed load of money that he hasn’t written off, and can’t call in without winding it up. He can’t sell the club because it worth nothing alongside the debt, so all he can try to do is increase its value. He will struggle to increase the club’s value without maximising revenue, as would any business.

But in the scheme of things our problems are not as big as at some other clubs, and in any case, we are where we are and there’s not much we can do about it except try and enjoy the good results we’re getting.
 
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Norman_Conquest said:
Say the club do put up the price £2 per game and 100 people who normally pay £30 per game decide they can't afford to pay £32 and stop going. Instead of the club gaining £200 per home game, they lose £3,000.
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Ye but if they’ve made 50 quid extra off 16000 season ticket holders they make an extra 800000

I would imagine no matter what league we are in next season due to the football being played our season tickets will go up therefore will negate any discouragement from walk ups
 
TeaCider said:
We did not make 2 loans signings and a cheap signing from Rotherham because we have the 2nd highest prices in the division.
.
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we have the 4th highest attendance in the league. If we charge 7 more than another team that could equate to around 1 million extra in gate receipts based on the mean attendance in the league
 
The dinosaur chairman strikes again

I mean we had some of the most expensive season ticket prices in the premier league when promoted . Some of the most expensive in the championship too .

Large portion of the time the ground looks empty . We’ve hardly competed for promotion for ages and we have a massive debt to Gibson which he incurred himself .

But yeah , we’re lucky to have him and we’re a well run club apparently .
 
The problem we have is there are such disparities in wealth. It is still possible to go see a band for not a great deal. You just go see a new act. Wet leg for example costs £5 (!) to £45 at the royal Albert hall. This is because young people go to see them. People who are young tend to have **** all money these days unless they give up on further education and live with their parents until they die. People in red faction are young, hence will be ***ed off by the prices.

One solution is to whack up the prices in the posh stands - people have always been willing to pay a premium to avoid the riff raff. Or give discounts to people under 30 and those on benefits.

Oh and the other reason gig tickets are so high is they are now priced by demand. Thanks for that Ticketmaster you utter utter utter *****. And at £400 for a Beyonce ticket I'd expect at least a hand job.
 
Some really pathetic comments on here from some ST holders who don't give monkeys for casual supporters. They don't seem to realise everyone has been a casual supporter at one time or other, absolutely no empathy at all.

I applaud the red faction for coming out and taking the club to task on ticket prices and possible rises at Boro. No other fan group or fan representatives have the balls to criticise the club on the matter. These fans reps will campaign for 20 is plenty for away games but perversely seem to think scalping home fans is somehow acceptable.
 
Glover_elbow said:
Some really pathetic comments on here from some ST holders who don't give monkeys for casual supporters. They don't seem to realise everyone has been a casual supporter at one time or other, absolutely no empathy at all.

I applaud the red faction for coming out and taking the club to task on ticket prices and possible rises at Boro. No other fan group or fan representatives have the balls to criticise the club on the matter. These fans reps will campaign for 20 is plenty for away games but perversely seem to think scalping home fans is somehow acceptable.
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Totally agree.

Pretty shocked at some of the comments, straight from the "Lee Anderson Book of Inspirational Quotes (forward by Simon Clarke)".

Zero empathy and a proper FU to real supporters who can't afford a ST or even walk up prices.

☹️☹️
 
Glover_elbow said:
Some really pathetic comments on here from some ST holders who don't give monkeys for casual supporters. They don't seem to realise everyone has been a casual supporter at one time or other, absolutely no empathy at all.

I applaud the red faction for coming out and taking the club to task on ticket prices and possible rises at Boro. No other fan group or fan representatives have the balls to criticise the club on the matter. These fans reps will campaign for 20 is plenty for away games but perversely seem to think scalping home fans is somehow acceptable.
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Not pathetic you just don’t agree with it because it will cost you a quid or two more, if you’re a casual fan fair enough but you don’t guarantee the clubs ticket income like a ST holder does. The pricing is done for a reason so that the club can continue to be as competitive as it can.
 
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