Season Ticket Discussion

[Tony Towner]

£629 behind the goals for 'new' applicants this season.

I can't see the renewal price being below that and it's taking the piss in my book. Two successive hikes that are completely unjustifiable.

I have always said my limit is £30 a game, so £570, that would be over £33

 

[YoungWolf]

£629 behind the goals for 'new' applicants this season.

I can't see the renewal price being below that and it's taking the piss in my book. Two successive hikes that are completely unjustifiable.

Yeah I couldn't afford that.

 

[Jabbawolf]

Really interesting to read these responses - guessing some of you, akin to Kinnock in 1992, will change your mind when the decision has to be made but the mood music is not positive.

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

It boils down to this:

- Do I still enjoy it? On some levels yes, but not as much as I used to
- Can I afford it? Yes, but I can afford lots of things technically. It's a lot of money
- Do I view £600+ as value for money? Unequivocally no
- Is it hard to get tickets as a member? No, my brother has missed one home game so far and that was out of choice, he isn't a STH
- Do I care where I sit? No, I moved seats this year to get away from a knobhead. Anywhere in the North Bank Upper will do, it's nice to sit nearish friends but it's not a dealbreaker
- Do I want to go to away games? Not particularly as it stands, broke that chain years ago. There are always ways and means for the odd game here and there if I do fancy it

I said it last year, you play a very dangerous game if you piss off fans who've been going for decades and you've squeezed the pips too hard. They don't forget and they find something else to do.

Can't play the "no games for 18 months" card, can't play the "you've had a discount" card (it wasn't a discount anyway, more that people wrote off money they'd spent two years ago), can't play the "in line with other clubs" card as you can only do that once and it was a load of bollocks anyway.

If they push to £629 that'll be something like a £115 rise since 2019/20. Completely unjustifiable because what is it paying for, it isn't transfers or wages (wouldn't be anyway) and it's not on ground improvements.

 

[Sniffer]

I think this is where the club really need to get their eyes on the ball. Season ticket holders are looking to give up their seats because tickets are available for pretty much every game as a member. As has been said on here before they might be sat there thinking the waiting list will replace those that go but I doubt that to be the case if it stretches to looking to fill a gap of a couple of thousand.

Season ticket increases are a nonsense in the grand scheme of Premier League football finance and they need to realise this and quickly.

 

[Deano]

Where I sit in Steve Bull upper, the new ST prices were over £700 if I remember correctly, That is probably going to be come standard price in the Summer or near to it,

 

[PuntsWolf]

I’ll renew regardless. But I don’t anticipate them increasing the prices anyway. Think they’ll stay at the current price of £550 or whatever it was. Think they will sting new buyers at £629 but keep the others the same, almost like a reverse early bird.

 

[Derby Wolf]

I think that they'll 'freeze' prices but with a real terms increase when Vinny the shyster makes auto enrollment for cup tickets a mandatory condition of having a season ticket.

Narurally, Judah will laud it as fucking brilliant from Wolves

The job promotion means I could easily afford to renew my season ticket now but it boils down to if its worth it for 19 games of football so I'd say I'm 50/50 on renewing at the moment particularly with the unwillingness of the club to invest. Its top 6 prices for bottom 6 investment that simply has to change.

 

[North Shropshire Lad]

I know someone at a very senior level in the club very well [doesn't mean I get any ITK info though - or very little that would be of interest] and I shared my views with him on last years proposed price hike that the club dialled back on. He towed the corporate line etc., etc. but given how this thread has developed, don't we as a Forum have a way of presenting these views to the club?

I could cut and paste and email/phone him again, but sharing it with the Fans Parliament or whatever the Trust is called that I think they've replaced it with would surely be more powerful. I seemed like a lone dissenter* in my message last time and this would be more powerful.
i know the FP was a bit of a car crash, but it seems to me they've lost touch with reality and the earnings of the 'legacy' fans.

*he also knew that I would renew anyway

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

The waiting list is nonsense for a couple of reasons:

- It effectively comes for free with membership (assuming you continue being a member year-on-year)
- Being on a waiting list means nothing. Vinny, Jeff et al might think that there are thousands of people just itching to buy a ST the very second they can, but they're sorely mistaken. Man Utd have had a waiting list in the tens of thousands for decades. Still isn't hard to get a ticket at Old Trafford when they play say, Palace or Burnley. You or I could get one very easily.

I completely understand why prices have gone up since say, 2017. Because there you're buying into a mid-table Championship team and now we are a mid-table Premier League team. But that's what we've been for four seasons in a row (unless we do something really spectacular in the remaining games, I doubt we will) and what we'll likely be next season too. You can't keep increasing prices every year when the product is basically the same.

They're completely tin-eared on the realities of the local economy too, particularly that arsehole Clark.

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

I know someone at a very senior level in the club very well [doesn't mean I get any ITK info though - or very little that would be of interest] and I shared my views with him on last years proposed price hike that the club dialled back on. He towed the corporate line etc., etc. but given how this thread has developed, don't we as a Forum have a way of presenting these views to the club?

I could cut and paste and email/phone him again, but sharing it with the Fans Parliament or whatever the Trust is called that I think they've replaced it with would surely be more powerful. I seemed like a lone dissenter* in my message last time and this would be more powerful.
i know the FP was a bit of a car crash, but it seems to me they've lost touch with reality and the earnings of the 'legacy' fans.

*he also knew that I would renew anyway

They do read my stuff when I bother writing (not that I really have for a year or more, for various reasons).

I could knock something together if there was the appetite for me to do so, I just couldn't promise anything on timescales. Happy to directly quote people (anonymously if required) so it didn't look like me just going on a one man rant, although I am apparently quite good at those.

 

[Alan]

They do read my stuff when I bother writing (not that I really have for a year or more, for various reasons).

I could knock something together if there was the appetite for me to do so, I just couldn't promise anything on timescales. Happy to directly quote people (anonymously if required) so it didn't look like me just going on a one man rant, although I am apparently quite good at those.

Not even a question, you silly man.

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

How does it work in terms of, lets say I get a ST and have an assigned seat by myself. What if I want to get a mate a ticket and want to sit next to them (or them to me)? Or if I want to start taking my daughter with me? Can I move the seat to somewhere where there are two seats together? Or is it just pot luck? Or am I just stuck by myself?

It's possible but really fiddly and comes down to availability (you'd also have to manually assign the ticket to your mate/daughter, so they'd probably need their own membership too, unless you fancied chancing it all on general sale).

You wouldn't want to be doing that regularly, for the sake of your own sanity.

 

[North Shropshire Lad]

They do read my stuff when I bother writing (not that I really have for a year or more, for various reasons).

I could knock something together if there was the appetite for me to do so, I just couldn't promise anything on timescales. Happy to directly quote people (anonymously if required) so it didn't look like me just going on a one man rant, although I am apparently quite good at those.

I think that there is enough of a response already, albeit from a relatively small number of people, to justify something. Even if it led them to just pause for a moment and consider whether it was really worth it in the grand scheme of thinks. We've discussed before, but the 10k+ waiting list was always a fallacy and the about turn on ground improvements/transfer expenditure means that can't be used either to justify the increases mooted last year and applied to newbies.

I will renew [and you can use that as well], partly because of habit but primarily because I live away from family and friends now and without the football I wouldn't really get to see any of them very often. I never want to miss games and that'll never change, but I am very, very conscious I'm in a relatively unusual position in that I can continue to afford it at the moment. I will never assume others can, although I'll always call out those who say they don't go because they can't get a ticket [not because they can't afford a ticket].

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

Although I do think it's to our advantage as a fanbase that the waiting list fiasco (and it is one, they will get very disappointed very quickly if they think there's an endless queue of new customers) is in its current form at our club. Like at United, you can hate the Glazers, hate their awful mandatory cup ticket scheme, hate the fact that the stadium is a shit tip and nothing has been done to fix issues that existed 20 years ago...but 100% someone will nab your ticket.

If we lost 3-4k season ticket holders this summer we would not find 3-4k new takers, wouldn't happen. It's a tiny, tiny form of leverage over the club.

One that stands out to me was in the League One season. 25 March 2014, 17,014 vs Colchester. Granted it's a midweek against shite opposition who only brought 200 or so, but still. 18 April 2014 (when we'd confirmed promotion) vs Rotherham, 30,110. Oh look, 12-13 thousand people suddenly found time they didn't have a month or so ago.

A lot of our fanbase is very fickle and very floating (like most clubs), so you don't want to piss off or needlessly price out the ones who all things being equal, will be there whatever.

 

[Aikiwolf]

Although I do think it's to our advantage as a fanbase that the waiting list fiasco (and it is one, they will get very disappointed very quickly if they think there's an endless queue of new customers) is in its current form at our club. Like at United, you can hate the Glazers, hate their awful mandatory cup ticket scheme, hate the fact that the stadium is a shit tip and nothing has been done to fix issues that existed 20 years ago...but 100% someone will nab your ticket.

If we lost 3-4k season ticket holders this summer we would not find 3-4k new takers, wouldn't happen. It's a tiny, tiny form of leverage over the club.

One that stands out to me was in the League One season. 25 March 2014, 17,014 vs Colchester. Granted it's a midweek against shite opposition who only brought 200 or so, but still. 18 April 2014 (when we'd confirmed promotion) vs Rotherham, 30,110. Oh look, 12-13 thousand people suddenly found time they didn't have a month or so ago.

A lot of our fanbase is very fickle and very floating (like most clubs), so you don't want to piss off or needlessly price out the ones who all things being equal, will be there whatever.

There's a huge opportunity for Wolves to improve on the whole ticketing situation, I think City (and maybe spurs) allow you to transfer your ticket to someone else (at cost and I'd assume the club takes a percentage).

So if I couldn't make a game I could "sell" to a member (LJ) and the club essentially makes a couple of quid without doing anything,plus they've sold LJ a membership which now means something.

Mind you, that would mean being able to upload tickets to smart cards and having a working app to transfer the tickets between people...

 

[Derby Wolf]

My s

If I was offered one, I'd probably take it because honestly, if I didn't do it now, I have no idea when I'd get the chance again. I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I can afford it, but I would probably get it with the expectation that there would still be a number of games I wouldn't be able to attend due to other commitments. My Mrs works every other Saturday, for example, and on those days I'm left to look after our two young children. I know we don't play on a Saturday afternoon at 3pm every week, but that will definitely have an impact on how many games I can attend.

That said, I think I know enough people who could have the seat for most games where I can't make it myself; so for me, it would be worth it to know I have a guaranteed seat.

How does it work in terms of, lets say I get a ST and have an assigned seat by myself. What if I want to get a mate a ticket and want to sit next to them (or them to me)? Or if I want to start taking my daughter with me? Can I move the seat to somewhere where there are two seats together? Or is it just pot luck? Or am I just stuck by myself?

My sister lives in Middlesbrough so doesn't do many games we try to do a couple per season where me and my dad relocate to three seats together it can be done but we haven't got three together since the Championship it might be two then one further along or a row in front etc. You'd have to be doing it as soon as loyalty points allow I imagine.

 

[Derby Wolf]

Sold it short, we should go fully app based and use contactless via a mobile to authenticate people into the ground.

Crystal Palace have already begun this, this season. Your ST is stored on your mobile wallet.

 

[Stan Hullis]

I'd probably take up a ST if offered in the summer.

Although my match day experience is largely dependant on who I end up spending it with these days so if a number of people I know don't renew then I might be less likely.

 

[Sniffer]

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