I had been disappointed at the decision to withdraw the £50 childs season tickets last season for those applying for the first time and I feel a rushed and incorrect decision was made by the club to try and recompense for missing out on two Sevco gates. As a result I was unwilling to pay the £129 for a 3 year olds season ticket and I suspect many took a similar view.
I was delighted this year to be able to purchase the childs season ticket for £50 for my now 4 year old who has now started to go and enjoy the match day at Celtic Park. The seat next to me was available and as it costs the now reduced amount of £488 and is in a prime position I was expecting to be told if I wanted a childs seat that I would have to move to the family section. This was not the case and the purchase was made for my son, albeit he won’t attend every match - it is his now for as long as he wants it to be, perhaps the rest of his life.
I think the move by Celtic towards offering the reduced prices to children of all ages (the £50 seat is valid for under 13’s) and encouraging familes to the ground is a focus on the long term future of the clubs support and the short term loss in seat prices is the opportunity cost of a future generation of attending fans. For many the club in the past was paying lip service to the issues concerning the fans when the ground was at capacity most weeks and there were alleged season ticket waiting lists and there lies the origins of future empty stands when the “glory hunters” disappear.
When I first started going to parkhead regularly in 1987 as a 14 year old it was £1.50 at the kids gate, we went as a group every fortnight and stood together in the jungle. Watching football was a rite of passage in which children, mostly boys, graduated from being taken to matches, to watching as young men, The conditions surrounding attending a match in those days was not appealing to the family or the younger child but the improving stadium facilities and the race to pay inflated wages for the players led to an increase in ticket prices which then began to preclude the next generation of 14 year olds. In addition to children the unemployed and the elderly became casualties in the price increases as the cost of surviving day to day rose in society.
When we go to Parkhead these days you don’t see a predominance of well healed middle class supporters; you see in the main ordinary punters who are stretching themselves every year to support their club. Last season the cost of having a season ticket and attending the home cup ties and Champions matches was upwards of £800. In todays economic climate this is a huge undertaking and if you have more than one supporter in your household it becomes even greater.
That’s one of the reasons that I get so annoyed with commentators and writers of the sport from the mainstream media who are quick to criticise and denigrate the size of an attendance for any particular game whilst sitting in the warmth of a studio having never paid for a season ticket in their life. It’s easy to shout Armageddon when you’re not contributing a penny to the sport and forget the cold hard reality of having to find the means to shell out £800 a season per person in an economic climate that is as bad as the world has seen in decades.
The decision by the club to reduce the price of season tickets was a welcome one and a great piece of marketing, the monetary saving itself was great for the fans and it may have just been enough to encourage someone wavering to renew. It also gave the fans a bit of feeling that the club we belong to was starting to put us before blinkered pricing strategies motivated purely by profit.
One of the greatest changes in the modern day supporter is the way some have aligned their thinking with the thoughts of directors and C.E.O’s of football clubs by paying as much attention to the balance sheets and potential profits from player sales as they do to the on field stuff and origins of the support.
There is an obsession with selling kits abroad and grandstanding about how important that a pre-season friendly v Real Madrid is viewed by millions across Asia. Its not my view that increasing revenue is a bad thing, its just that its got very little to do with the heritage and traditions of why the club was set up and those groups of people in society who helped establish the club and maintain it for over a century are priced out.
I’m very, very lucky I have a steady income (touch wood!) that allows me to renew my season ticket and take my son as I know there are many who can’t afford it. I appreciate that in the current climate one of the thngs that would have to be set aside if circumstances changed would be the Season Ticket and I can’t imagine how soul destroying it must be for someone in that position to have to do so and tell their kids they couldn’t afford to take them. The Kano foundation and initiatives by the club to give schools tickets are something to be supported and rightly proud of, long may they continue.
Of the group of five us who used to go to the games together as teenagers only two of us are still season ticket holders, two are either non-attenders due to financial / commitment reasons and one is what we would term a “glory hunter”. The reality is after 15 – 20 years away from attending football you are not going to be able to entice these guys back. Going from not attending football and paying nothing to watch live football to paying £450 a season is not an easy sell. It is not the 40 something guys that you need to target to fill the stadium it’s the 40-Somethings’ kids you need to hook into. If you want to fill the stadium you get the kids hooked – if you want to sell merchandise you get the kids hooked.
Children have this amazing skill of getting what they want – eventually!, their parents want to please them if they have the means; so if a child wants to go to a game the family will most likely decide to go to a game; if they have been at a game and the kid wants the merchandise then they will eventually get the merchandise. If the kid becomes hooked on Celtic then Birthdays and Christmas presents will be Celtic Strips; balls and books rather than Ben 10 or spiderman. A person in their forties will rationalise their decisions when purchasing, they will not buy two new kits a season for themselves but for their kids? You bet and Celtic know this.
For many of the kids today getting along to parkhead courtesy of reduced season ticket prices or because the Kano foundation have made it possible, they will become Celtic fans and consumers for life – cradle to the grave. Miss them when they are younger and you may not be able to entice them later on and Celtic will be well aware of the amount of money a lifetime fan will contribute to the club. The disenfranchised; disinterested and long time abstainers will be brought back to Celtic, not by the club directly but by their kids.
One of the most pleasurable aspects of last season for me was taking my son to his first dozen matches and seeing how quickly he has been bitten by all things Celtic – he can’t yet read but he collects the programmes and flicks through the pages on a daily basis. He has over 20 programmes which I bought for him last season at a cost of £2.50 each that’s £50 spent as a result of him showing an interest and me wanting to encourage it and make him happy. See – it works.
The best way you can get families to buy into something and commit finances is to market to them as a family. Families always want to make decisions that will benefit the whole and not just one person in the family. Attracting families and children is one thing, but maintaining their loyalty requires the club to keep a close relationship with its fans and make concessions towards giving something back to the support is important; the free admission training day was a great example of this.
I suspect as part of the match day experience next season we will start to see some form of pre or half time entertainment to make the memory of a matchday last in peoples minds and demonstrate to them why their tight budget for family entertainment should be spent at Celtic and not at other competing outlets.
So I would commend the club greatly for the initiatives they have put in place and hope that in maintaining this strategy and keeping connected with the support the benefits will flow back into the club in future years through the lifelong supporters of the club and full stadiums.
