After the Bologna game, where the attendance was 20k down on the projected new capacity, and today when there were large clusters of empty seats in the Upper Trinity, I've been wondering whether we will need the added capacity. Or whether the club will need to look at pricing again.
We have a few thousand who'd be o.k paying 400-500 quid for season tickets when more become available with 50k capacity.
What we don't have and possibly will never have unless we're actually winning league and cups in future is thousands and thousands who will just drop £60 + on individual games on regular basis.
The majority of our home support now is season ticket based compared to 20 years back so I think many don't realise how much the 2-3 tickets available for pretty much all prem games are now and so are baulking at paying it for Europa. Bologna will probably be our biggest crowd in europa before March aswell.
Was looking at Burnley game and the pricing. Again in the 2000s this would've been a Villa Value game and 15-25 quid in North Stand and Holte wings. Now the cheapest tickets in those parts are 45-47 quid and everywhere else is £50 +.
So add an extra £15 for every part of the ground for a Europa game every month and the club have miscalculated the demand which was more due to the hype of being in CL after so long away.
We are not London. We don't have thousands of tourists desperate to see a game and although we've improved significantly we're not quite at the level yet where we know we're going to be top 6 every single year so these things need to be taken into account otherwise we won't be getting above 35k in Europa until QFs.