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Match Day Thread: Crawley

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  • @drcongo - I'm most certainly not arguing something that @DevC made up. But you seem to be arguing there isn't any clear indication of ticket pricing on the ticket website.

    So, I'm interested to know what you consider to be the Wycombe Wanderers Ticketing site?

    Personally for me it's ...

    www.wwfc.com/tickets

    There is a very clear and obvious link to ticket prices, it's just not a great big headline.

    Like I said, if we're trying to argue that's an issue which is somehow stopping anyone from coming to watch Wycombe then I truly despair.

  • Despair of the world, that is, not the gasroom.

  • I don't think they do. With a few exceptions we all struggle at this level. I do wonder what makes Northampton do differently from us to have a sustained level of attendance despite their bang average performances.

  • But attendances across the football league are up on average.

  • Correct and against Crawley we had the second lowest attendance in League 1 (only Burton attracted fewer fans) and there were 5 higher attendances in League 2, not the first time that has happened this season. It’s so disappointing when we have a successful team playing attractive and attacking football.

  • It is indeed. But the message will gradually get across and register with people locally that Wycombe Wanderers are playing Premier League style football.

    It might even happen in my lifetime!

  • I still think that we are anonymous in the town

    We should recruit some budding academic talent at Wycombe Uni or whatever it is called to do some work into awareness of the club and barriers. The definitive thesis on the Bloomball era

  • That's the tickets page on the main site, the tickets site is https://tickets.wwfc.com

  • We've all come up with reasons why attendances are poor but what I cannot understand is what I perceive as the club doing nothing proactively in trying to engage with attracting new fans. I would love to hear from the club officially on this subject. Another interview with Dan Rice?

  • And I'd argue that the tickets page of the main website is the most likely point of entry for casual fans.

    Clearly we differ - although I'm not sure you'd know the ticket sites web address unless you'd previously used it.

  • I suppose gate income is not, currently at least, a priority but it does matter to fans who get a bigger buzz the bigger and more vocal the crowd. And we’re going to look a bit out of place with 4,000 home fans in the Premier League.

    Realistically of course, in the medium term, we’re likely to be in the same category as Barnsley or Rotherham, yo-yo-ing between the Championship and League One. Such a shame that Covid prevented us from seeing how attractive gate-wise we might have been in the Championship.

  • edited October 8

    Wycombe isn’t a footballing town, too many people now have moved into the area, particularly from London and if they’re into football they’d have brought their premier league team with them. The wealthier types in the area ( of which there are many ) are probably into Rugby if they’re into sport at all and will believe that the football is only frequented by foul mouthed hooligans( remember the bad press WWFC got when Wasps were in town), so they will do all they can to stop their little darlings from going anywhere near a “soccer” game.

    The key is getting into the state schools and local youth football clubs and getting kids in that way probably by way of free kids tickets with a paying adult kind of deal.

  • The kids are changing to. My son refuses to watch any football on TV but has been to circa 500 matches.

    He only wants to watch things live. His contemporaries want to watch highlights on YouTube, Twitter and Insta. They don’t seem to have the attention span to watch a whole game on TV and aren’t so fussed on live games.

    It won’t be long until the marketing people stop advertising and the money dries up. It’s apparently started on content platforms like Netflix. The writers want a piece of the pie and have asked for the figures, when they’ve seen them and then the marketing people reviewed, apparently they’re pulling adverts as there is little ROI. Anyway that was the conversation in the pub the other day…I have no idea if it’s true or not.

    Maidenhead United are attracting a lot of teenagers, mainly as their ticket prices are very low and they are in the town center. Very easy to get to without a parent. Around 30-40% of John Hampden pupils are based in Maidenhead, those that do football tend to go to Maidenhead United.

    The pubs are dead, the stands are sparse, we’re all doomed!!!

  • edited October 8

    “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks)

    Gramsci probably wasn't thinking about Wycombe ticketing when he wrote these words but in a strange way he was.

  • But when Gareth was in charge you repeatedly said that the only thing that mattered was the result, not the style of play. Have you now changed your tune?

  • It was and still is my opinion that results matter more than anything else but it’s an opinion that clearly isn’t shared by everyone. My point is that many people blamed poor attendances on Gareth’s style of play yet now that we are combining good results with a style that is easier on the eye attendances have actually got worse. How do you explain that?

  • I'd imagine it's an awful lot easier to stop going than it is to start going again.

    Once you're out of the habit you pretty much become like a new fan again

  • I agree with you, but would you agree that it might be less difficult to woo back those who used to be regulars than to attract brand new fans?

  • Digital ad revenues are increasing year on year, especially in video. They're predicted to rise another 2.4% between now and 2029.

  • Maybe, just maybe ... there are other factors at play, many, acting simultaneously, some internal, some external.

    ps - the attitude that the result is the most important thing is one of the reasons why football is awash with cheats. It is the very death of sportsmanship.

  • Playing like Manchester City and having 99% possession v shit-housing a 1-0 win with Darius Charles scoring the winner.


    Style of play? I know what camp I am in.

  • I’m sorry but whether you like it or not, there is a mountain of evidence that football is a results driven sport.

  • @glasshalffull I have no idea why you are responding to my post as if I have denied that football is a results driven sport.

  • where is the "wooing" though? I don't see much evidence of it myself

  • We are in agreement on this point. I have long believed that we could do so much more to promote the club in High Wycombe and surrounding areas and for relatively little cost.

  • This thread is so depressing. The club seem to be blind to the attendance issues.

    I may be over simplifying the problem but I feel the root of the low attendances is the club is not part of the community.

    The Wycombe Wanderers community scheme was in the vast majority of primary schools in south Bucks.

    Every primary school pupil knew that Wycombe had a team, and that they played in the quarters.

    I don't know what the SET brings to the wider community, I see they do some valuable work, but it seems to focused on very small groups.

    I coached for the community scheme for 15 year, my Saturday club would have 70 + young people at least 25% wearing WWFC shirts.

    Half time penalties and small sided games on the pitch could see 40 kids plus parents and grandparents attending and spending money.

    Get back into the community now!

    On a personal note, why are the beer prices and selection so poor at AP? My group have stopped pre match beers at the ground, I cannot justify to the lovely Mrs Fit that £19.50 for 3 beers is reasonable. So WW have lost my beer money and at least 4 more in my group. I cant even hide the cost as its bloody cashless.

  • Some real good points on here and in other posts on this topic. It would be good if we (the gasroom), could have a Q&A with Dan Rice on this topic. I am sure many of us would volunteer to spread the word and help where we can, to enable more interest in WWFC from within our community but we need the club to buy into it.

    Dan appears to be a real nice and very clever gentleman and I know he is very busy but maybe @bluntphil or @AlanCecil could set something up to help us get some traction via an initial Q&A session.

    We clearly have some real good ideas and some real knowledge of what seemed to work in the past, the key will be to get the ball rolling and get stuck into the task.

  • My big gripe on the whole issue of decreasing attendances, is the club seem to be doing absolutely nothing to address the issue. I know we have an owner with bottomless pockets but surely the club want more fans through the door to improve the atmosphere and help the players on the pitch.

  • When club owners leave they take their bank accounts with them and they leave their problems behind, so whether the current incumbent can afford to live with the issue is different to whether the club as a whole can afford to live with the issue. It's the same with the training ground, the playing budget, the stadium upkeep - if these fundamental issues are unresolved over time, they bite us in the ar*e when MMB et al, Steve Hayes, Rob Couhig or Mr L up sticks and we end up with a threadbare first team and an empty subs bench. With this in mind, the type of discussion above is absolutely vital to our future, even if it seems like it is not our problem today.

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