The only slight drawback to offset this is that the streaming price is half the ticket price of one adult ticket, who can then put it on the telly and have a bubble round to watch it. So we would have to oversell by a margin more than the usual box office sales in order to recoup the value.
But as you say, having the capacity for 20,000 Sunderland fans to pay for their away match at the Kassam second game in, rather than the 2,000 odd that we can usually accomodate, should make it worth it in most instances.
The numbers would’ve been there when you throw in households of people all over the country as well as abroad who can’t usually go to games anyway, plus the uncapped access to every single away supporter who now doesn’t have to spend £80 on fuel, food, parking, tickets etc, or who simply can’t dedicate an entire day to it rather than the few hours they get away with for home games. Or both. Can you be free from 3-5? Do you have £15? Great. You can ‘go to’ the game, whether you’re in your living room or simply looking at your phone. Plus the marketing ability from having direct access to every single fan, in real time at that. Live special offers, ecommerce data collection, creative merchandising and limited edition items for match pass holders, virtual 50/50 draws - there is simply no way we wouldn’t have made at least as much money as getting a few thousand ST holders to cough up at multiple price points for the same thing, potentially having some of them who can’t attend at reduced capacity and all the nonsense that brings with it, probably no walk-ups for most if not all of the season anyway as well as no away ticket handling fees...
It’s there. It’s all there. And even when crowds can come back, you’ve got a whole new world ready to go. America has smashed this clean out of the park for years - an amazing hybrid of access where you can watch every single game of every single sport, and stadiums and arenas alike are still packed. Because people would rather have the experience of being there live and in the flesh, but for those who simply can’t there is still the option and with it the revenue. Why is every single game we play that’s put on television currently still attended as normal? Why do we sell out the cup games that are on Sky for £7 for a day pass, or on BBC for free? Why are the regular league fixtures that are occasionally on still attended by a perfectly normal, regular size crowd? People want to be there. Football as a whole is lazy and short sighted, and has an irrational fear that just because you point a camera at a football pitch nobody will want to go and sit in the stands anymore, even though access to football over the last 30 years turned dwindling crowds into sold out super stadiums. Pies, programmes and salary caps are much easier to cling to, rather than looking at something that is actually about more than just this one season - it would increase revenue streams for years to come.
I’ve been willing to die on this hill before, when I intentionally discarded newsstand sales at a music magazine I ran in favour of selling globally through our own e-commerce platform. I didn’t want to depend on Tesco and Sainsbury or the corner shops of Ipswich and Inverness for an existence, I wanted to bring all revenue in house where we controlled sales, didn’t have to share margins with the retailer, slashed distribution costs but most importantly, gathered data and access to every single person who ever made a purchase. I then set about creating higher tiered price points, so rather than just selling a magazine for a fiver we had a package at £15 that included a piece of merch of the cover artist, for £30 you could get a better piece of merch as well as something signed by the band etc. I then started buying and selling exclusive variants of albums by the artists that the brand covered, and got the online store chart registered so that they counted towards chart positions. I did deals with artists for exclusive merch designs and cut them in on the profits, so we became a source of revenue for bands rather than merely a source of exposure. And sales grew because we had all the data, so we could see every person who ever ordered something of a certain band, or a certain type of product, or from within certain price points, and create a section of VIP customers who ordered the most often. We could then target them whenever we had relevant new items, give them exclusive discount codes, early access to sales... by the end of year two we were making more money than we ever made just selling magazines off a shelf that we had to pay somebody to be on. Everybody said it was suicide and would be the end of the business. “You can’t survive unless you just dump the issue on the shelves and hope enough people buy it. That’s how it works; that’s the way it’s always been.” That company is now one of the only alternative music magazines left in operation, while the likes of Q, Kerrang! and the NME no longer exist as anything more than a website that can’t generate enough cash to pay more than two or three staff. We were a small independent company owned by one man who sat in the corner, while all the others were owned by billion-pound global publishers. And absolutely everything on the business side was done by just me and an owner in his fifties who knew nothing about the internet or e-commerce when we started. From the initial idea, all the way through every step of implementation and setup, right the way through to the day-to-day operations - two people built and maintained it all. So any company can do something similar and to scale. And not only is that company still pretty much the only one left in its sector, but it’s got twice the number of people working there that it did when it all started changing. So it isn’t just surviving, it is actively growing and thriving.
Sorry - I’m aware of the essay this has been, and most people probably won’t give a damn and will still disagree - but I know football has got this wrong. It’s got no idea of the opportunity it is passing up, and America alone is sat there waving at everybody and pointing at how it’s done. The world isn’t the same anymore, it changed before Covid let alone since, and so it’s about time that the people in charge of the game started acting like they have a clue what they’re doing, or give a damn about anybody outside of the biggest 30-odd clubs.