Attendences Again

[Pepper]

We have too many leagues and too many teams imo. The sooner we accept we are a small country and consolidate the teams that we have the better. These larger teams could filter into the various english leagues and then we could tap into the big money TV revenue. Anything has to be better than what we've got the now and what we're being told is the way forward by the SPL and the McLeish review.

[Cakes]

This is something different altogether and not something i have heard of before, have any other well fans had this experience?

I would hate to think so because it's Motherwell - home of Motherwell F.C. and where Motherwell F.C. play. We retain the moral high ground and if we become intimidated by the glory hunting, bigoted cunts in our own town then we're fucked. I've probably never noticed any snidey looks because I'm too busy looking down my nose at them with thinly veiled disgust. Biffs and mongs, the lot of them.

[Kmcalpin]

I don't often wear C & A scarves/hats normally on non match days but always make a point of doing so when I'm in Motherwell. Never experienced any odd looks, and if I did I'd challenge the parties concerned.

[punk_in_drublic]

I think the facts are their are too many teams as others have pointed out.

 

Here are some other facts. The following is for the first two tiers of Scottish Football only.

 

Town Population

 

Rangers 580690

Celtic 580690

Hearts 477660

ICT 56660

Kilmarnock 44734

Motherwell 30312

Dundee Utd 142070

St. Johnstone 44820

Hibernian 477660

St. Mirren 74000

Hamilton 48546

Aberdeen 213810

Dunfermline 46430

Dundee 142070

Raith Rovers 48630

Falkirk 34071

QoS 43009

Cowdenbeath 11640

Ross County 5026

Partick 580690

Morton 45467

Stirling 33710

 

If this data is sorted to show the team with the smallest town population it reads:

 

Town Population

 

Rangers 580690

Celtic 580690

Partick 580690

Hearts 477660

Hibernian 477660

Aberdeen 213810

Dundee Utd 142070

Dundee 142070

St. Mirren 74000

ICT 56660

Raith Rovers 48630

Hamilton 48546

Dunfermline 46430

Morton 45467

St. Johnstone 44820

Kilmarnock 44734

QoS 43009

Falkirk 34071

Stirling 33710

Motherwell 30312

Cowdenbeath 11640

Ross County 5026

 

So we are third smallest out of the top two leauges, which is really surprising.

 

But you could argue that the surrounding area should also be included therefore looking at it from a county view it would be as follows:

 

County Poulation

 

Rangers 584200

Celtic 584200

Partick 584200

Hearts 471700

Hibernian 471700

Dunfermline 361900

Raith Rovers 361900

Cowdenbeath 361900

Motherwell 325500

Hamilton 310100

ICT 220490

Ross County 220490

Aberdeen 210400

St. Mirren 169800

Falkirk 151800

QoS 148600

St. Johnstone 144200

Dundee Utd 142500

Dundee 142500

Kilmarnock 119900

Stirling 88400

Morton 80800

 

So in terms of county we are sitting about 9th.

 

But although there are loads of tiny teams with poor supports, you could argue that they have a right to exist as they have been established for so long, so looking at established dates the top two leagues would be as follows.

 

Team Established

 

ICT 1994

Stirling 1945

Ross County 1929

QoS 1919

Dundee Utd 1909

Aberdeen 1903

Dundee 1893

Celtic 1888

Motherwell 1886

Dunfermline 1885

St. Johnstone 1884

Raith Rovers 1883

Cowdenbeath 1881

St. Mirren 1877

Falkirk 1876

Partick 1876

Hibernian 1875

Hearts 1874

Hamilton 1874

Morton 1874

Rangers 1873

Kilmarnock 1869

 

This is obviously only the top two leagues, however you could do the same for the SFL 2, 3 Juniors East, Juniors West and Highland leagues, it would be interesting to see the results. I really believe that teams need to merge but how can you do that.

 

If you look at London, it has a popultation of 8 million people. If you look at the top 4 leagues in England, EPL, Championship, EFL 1, 2 then you will find their are 13 London based teams. This highlights our problem in terms of attendances.

[David]

It's not that big a mystery really.

 

Less people can afford £20 to go to a game these days, not to mention the other costs associated with attending football.

 

Simple as that.

[sinjy]

I know a few lapsed Well fans mostly in the 50, 60, 70 age group.

Lots had season tickets in the past. Now they pay their Sky subscription – about £500 is it? Not much more than a centre stand season ticket for 20 games at Fir Park.

For that they get unlimited football.

They see stars from all over the world and get to compare the standard at Fir Park when they watch us in our five or six televised games. Comparing what they see with the rest of world football does not encourage them back.

In the sixties seventies and eighties if you wanted to see the big stars you had to go to the game. I remember going to Hampden in 1965 to see Brazil and Pele play Scotland.

Now Messi and the rest are in our living rooms every week. Yet the clubs want people to pay £20 plus to watch our average players.

TV has killed live football. Who in their right mind would travel from Edinburgh last Tuesday when the roads were bad it was minus 5 it cost £22 to get in and you could have stayed at home or went to you local spent a tenner on three pints and been warm and got a better view of the controversial incidents.

I don’t think the standard is any worse than it was 10, 20, years ago. It is just that we see all the top players now on TV and expect Scottish football to be as good.

[punk_in_drublic]

I dont think it is that simple.

 

If you summate the total number of people attending football matches in Scotland and divide it through by the population you will get a performance metric. If you do the same in England you will get the English equivalent. You might find that these are similar therefore if that was the case you cant put it down solely to cost.

 

If the ground capacity, not average attendances of all 13 senior London teams are summated and averaged out over the population of London, the percentage of the population that could be fitted into all the 13 senior stadia is 4.06%.

 

Now if we take Rangers crowd as 50,000 and Celtics are 60,000 (which apparently they get each weekend) and divide it through by Glasgows urban population, you find that the amount of people actually going to these two stadiums is 6.29% of the population.

 

This shows that people are paying to go to matches, it shows that even if all of Londons top 13 teams stadiums were full to the brim each week (which they are not) they still have a lower percentage of people attending per head of population that Rangers and Celtic actually get.

 

So is the problem we have too many team? Is the problem that too many peole over the country are Rangers and Celtic fans? Is the problem that outside Rangers and Celtic the other teams serve up crap which people arent willing to pay? There is a larger problem that people arent willing to pay the cash. I think that definately is one of the reasons, but its not the sole reason. I think Scotland has far too many football teams for its size to be a commercial power.

 

As an example, look at Fife, its population (as a council area) is 361, 900. Its senior teams are Dunfermline, Raith Rovers, Codenbeath and East Fife. The area is also near Dundee and Falkirk so you will potentially get folk from Fife supporting Dundee Utd, Dundee or Falkirk.

 

In England there are 92 teams in the EPL, Championship, EFL1 and EFL2, and the country has a population of 51,466,000 so thats 559,195 people per club. In Scotland their are 42 teams in the senior leagues with a populatin of 5,194,000 which gives 123,666 people per club. There just isnt the population to sustain the number of teams.

[David]

The tribal aspect attached to the Old Firm clubs in this country mean it's virtually impossible to draw a comparison with any other footballing nation.

 

Both Celtic & Rangers draw a fair chunk of their support from the north & south of Ireland every week, along with a lesser amount of fans coming up from down south.

 

Add to that the amount of people who travel from all over Scotland to watch both sides, along with the Glasgow based fanbase.

 

The only real exceptions can be found in Edinburgh & Aberdeen, where Hearts, Hibs & Aberdeen can draw a decent home crowd most weeks (recent Aberdeen shenanigans apart).

 

The west of Scotland primarily is always going to be faced with the Old Firm pilgrimage every week.

 

The only way to put a dent in that is to make our football more attractive to the local customer. It just so happens that the local customer in Motherwell is pretty skint.

 

We need to be letting under 16's into the games for nothing, and reducing the cost of matchday tickets, especially games that are televised.

 

We can batter about ideas such as reducing the league, expanding the league etc all we want, but if £20 a ticket is too much for the majority when it's 12 teams, it'll still be too much when it's 10 teams or 18 teams.

 

As the financial situation in the country worsens, we'll see less and less people coming to games.

[punk_in_drublic]

So, so far we have deduced to things:

 

1. Football is too expensive in Scotland.

2. Rangers and Celtic absorb too much support from the nation (and other nations) overall.

 

I would say these are two real points, is there anymore substantiated things that people can think of, as i think these two are definates but there will be more. People are debating whether the product is still as good, but it seems like their are split opinions on that. Some people are saying its easy to sit in a watch it now, so culturally its different, i think that might be point 3.

[David]

The first step I would take if I owned the club would be free entry to every under 16 who wanted to come to the games, with the exception of games against the old firm.

 

If we are going to build a fanbase we need to get them at a young age, and the best way to do that is to make the games easily available to them.

 

I mean, we have enough empty seats most weeks anyway...

[claretbandonambershirt]

I would love to walk down our town centre and see pennants and flags flying from every lamp post advertising MFC. Claret and amber everywhere you look. Posters up in EVERY shop advertising the next game be it home or away.

However to do that the initial outlay would be hefty, which stops it dead in its tracks. I always wondered why we couldn't get out new sponsors to include this as part of their sponsorship agreement taking the cost away from the club.

 

I believe the town centre is owned by a company, so why not get them involved as well, With the amount of businessmen and women on our board I would like to think these type of avenues have been explored. What do we have to lose, someone saying no, fair enough, move on to the next idea.

 

No doubt we would have the old firm fans complaining and wanting their team to come in and do the same and NLC banning it due to complaints from old firm fans...

 

I like this idea. The Town of Motherwell has never really embraced the Club. The more people who are attracted to FP on a Saturday, the more money the town and businesses will make.

[underboyleheating]

I like this idea. The Town of Motherwell has never really embraced the Club. The more people who are attracted to FP on a Saturday, the more money the town and businesses will make.

In an ideal world the local council would promote all things Motherwell Football Club. Unfortunately we are a business and the town won’t want to be seen to show bias to one business over another. Any flags, advertising of games would need to be paid for by the club. That would cost money, money we sadly don’t have. The idea of a sea of claret & amber throughout the town centre is a complete non starter. Unless of course we win the cup!

[fatcalf]

In an ideal world the local council would promote all things Motherwell Football Club. Unfortunately we are a business and the town won't want to be seen to show bias to one business over another. Any flags, advertising of games would need to be paid for by the club. That would cost money, money we sadly don't have. The idea of a sea of claret & amber throughout the town centre is a complete non starter. Unless of course we win the cup!

 

Yet another reason to go back to being the local football club instead of running it like a business. That's when it all started going wrong

[Martin]

If i remember correctly most shops in the town centre had a Motherwell display in the window for the CIS final in '05. So not too unfeasable surely?

[underboyleheating]

If i remember correctly most shops in the town centre had a Motherwell display in the window for the CIS final in '05. So not too unfeasable surely?

For cup finals yes, all through the year, not a hope in (W)ell!

[DEWELL]

The big problem we face is the price of Scottish football also playing during the winter especially leading up to xmas is going to have an affect on crowds. There's too many distractions also now on a saturday. Im afraid i cant see any reversal in dropping attendances any time soon i believe we've {lost} about 2000 fans which is a worry.

[Special aka]

I believe there's a multitude of reasons for the colapse of The Beautiful Game as a popular spectacle, but to me the Top-3 are The Taylor Report, The Bosman Ruling and the evolution of Agents.

 

Sitting down has killed the atmosphere, the Bosman Ruling has nullified a much needed income stream for Clubs like Motherwell and the evolution of Agents has systematically creamed many Clubs, and the Game dry.

[East_Stand_Al]

Slightly off topic but perhaps if there was a club shop/ticket outlet in the town centre instead of just at the stadium it would help.

 

Obviously costs would be a issue and perhaps the club could come to some sort of deal with Provan Sports involving the unit at FP in terms of rent (assuming they do pay rent for it) that would help fund a town centre shop.

 

A town centre unit where we could have player signings /promo events etc. could help raise the profile of MFC in our home town as IMO its not as high profile as it should be.

[Jonesy]

Slightly off topic but perhaps if there was a club shop/ticket outlet in the town centre instead of just at the stadium it would help.

 

Obviously costs would be a issue and perhaps the club could come to some sort of deal with Provan Sports involving the unit at FP in terms of rent (assuming they do pay rent for it) that would help fund a town centre shop.

 

A town centre unit where we could have player signings /promo events etc. could help raise the profile of MFC in our home town as IMO its not as high profile as it should be.

 

 

They usually have a temporary set up at this time each year for a few weeks somewhere up the Street. Don't know if we have it this year, haven't been through there for months.

 

That sort of set up is beneficial but I'd reckon to have something like that set up would be pretty negligible having to pay rent and wages to have it staffed all the time.

[Finlay]

Wee bit off the subject but Killie played Hibs yesterday, 3pm on a Saturday afternoon, not live on TV, and with the home side playing their best football in a number of years. Crowd was just over 4,200 according to the papers. Very poor.

[Auldyin]

Large advert for the Rangers game on the back page of the Sunday Mail.

Plenty of tickets left.

 

Step in the right direction??

[Finlay]

Large advert for the Rangers game on the back page of the Sunday Mail.

Plenty of tickets left.

 

Step in the right direction??

 

Club will probably lose out on a fair bit of income if this game gets cancelled. Boxing Day, 3pm kick off, game not on the TV or a random Tuesday night in say January? No brainer that one I think.

 

Fingers crossed this one gets the go ahead. Should see a big crowd at this one

[Taff]

Slightly off topic but perhaps if there was a club shop/ticket outlet in the town centre instead of just at the stadium it would help.

 

Obviously costs would be a issue and perhaps the club could come to some sort of deal with Provan Sports involving the unit at FP in terms of rent (assuming they do pay rent for it) that would help fund a town centre shop.

 

A town centre unit where we could have player signings /promo events etc. could help raise the profile of MFC in our home town as IMO its not as high profile as it should be.

 

Aye that would be great. The empty corner shop just down from Argos would be perfect.

[mjw]

There is one problem re a shop down the precinct - have any of you had walk through there recently? i think i would rather have the seat next to me sitting empty than have some of the mutants that spend their days hanging around down there sitting beside me.

[Spiderpig]

There are many reasons why attendances are falling, not just at Motherwell but at every club. In my opinion i think the main ones are

 

1. Tickets cost too much

 

2. Increased TV coverage (do i spend £30 or £40 to go to a game, ticket, travel, food etc or sit at home and watch on TV) if you are on a budget its a no brainer.

 

I dont think the product on offer has any effect, scottish football has always been at this standard, we only percieve it to be poor as we are now able to compare it against games from almost every league in the world on TV. One of the earlier posts on this thread compared the players we have now for motherwell against the players from say 15 years ago, i think we have a better standard now.

 

Motherwell have always been a poorly supported club, i am sure that if some stats geek analysed the figures over the years i would be surprised if our season average was much above 5000. Even if you go back to the large crowds of the 1920's and 30's what was there to spend your cash on then compared to now.

As long as the club budgets for the smaller crowds and lives within its means we will be ok, we have tried all the "lets spend and try to be the big club" scenario and it nearly put us out of business. We are a small club with a small average gate, but given the choice of supporting motherwell or a Barcelona, or Man Untd, its Fir park every time.