St James' Park

[midds]

Probably being a bit bullish here but I think we sell out 80k against virtually any opponent right now. The demand is there right now imo, people want to see this team and as we improve it'll only get a more and more desirable ticket to have. Bromley at home in the cup went to ballot. How many missed out? How many didn't apply because they knew they'd probably miss out? 

 

Confident we'd fill 80k virtually every game

[et tu brute]

1 hour ago, Danh1 said:

Wonder what the correlation is between people who are happy to have 5/10k empty seats and those who mock the mackems. 
 

No correlation as we won't try and argue that there wasn't that many seats unsold and any figure is based on seats sold not actually in attendance, like those thick fuckers do. I believe we will sell out anyway so it will be a moot question anyway

[Danh1]

25 minutes ago, midds said:

Probably being a bit bullish here but I think we sell out 80k against virtually any opponent right now. The demand is there right now imo, people want to see this team and as we improve it'll only get a more and more desirable ticket to have. Bromley at home in the cup went to ballot. How many missed out? How many didn't apply because they knew they'd probably miss out? 

 

Confident we'd fill 80k virtually every game

There’s about 600 tickets available in level 7 for the Bromley game. Do appreciate that it’s just after Christmas and quite pricey for a cup game against unglamorous opposite, mind 

[HawK]

1 hour ago, HaydnNUFC said:

What utter fucking AIDS that’d be.

 

Yup !

[LFEE]

56 minutes ago, Danh1 said:

You make a some good points, particular around ticket prices. 
 

You know my views, I want to somehow stay at SJP, build a big fuck off stand behind the goal. I have accepted it’ll be a case of moving and just hope we get it right. 
 

I read bits from Spurs fans on social media (I kna, I kna) and it’s scary. Some of them feel detached from the club. Away fans all over the ground.

Yes but Spurs had a smaller specific fanbase than ours then and doubled the size of their stadium that they didn’t always fill. We are looking to to add 20-25k on to get mainly fans locked out after leaving because of Ashley and Rafa debacle. Levy’s plan was far more calculated.

[Wandy]

1 hour ago, Whitley mag said:

I could see Arsenal going bigger and possibly Liverpool at some stage, though that looks very difficult for them anytime soon, due to the number of streets they need demolished for the Kenny Dalglish stand.

 

What worries me though is that they have huge international fan bases, with fans travelling from all over to watch them, they also have far bigger catchment areas locally, not sure how we fill 70k plus regularly if I’m being honest.

 

Chelsea and West Ham could possibly end up over 65k, but again huge catchment areas and prime location to capture the football tourists.

 

Possibly 70k but would need to really rethink their pricing to fill that up here in my opinion.

 

Do they have bigger local catchment areas? We have an entire quarter of the country to ourselves, something that they dont. If we were to be successful too I could see us having a significant following north of the border too.

[Stifler]

Arsenal are going bigger, they announced their intention a few weeks back. They want to go up to 80k, but it means that they have to move their roof up, and add a tier.

They also need to upgrade a few Underground stations nearby.

[Chris_R]

2 hours ago, Danh1 said:

Wonder what the correlation is between people who are happy to have 5/10k empty seats and those who mock the mackems. 
 

 

Not sure anyone mocks the mackems for having empty seats. We mock them for the club blatantly lying about attendances, about the mackems patting themselves on the back for the "attendances", and the fact that as a fanbase they so blind with rage about us they spend vast energies coming up with excuses as to why they aren't selling out all the time.

 

If the club just announced 25k like is probably in the ground most weeks and owned that number collectively as a fanbase, then fair enough. Nothing to mock.

[duo]

2 hours ago, midds said:

Probably being a bit bullish here but I think we sell out 80k against virtually any opponent right now. The demand is there right now imo, people want to see this team and as we improve it'll only get a more and more desirable ticket to have. Bromley at home in the cup went to ballot. How many missed out? How many didn't apply because they knew they'd probably miss out? 

 

Confident we'd fill 80k virtually every game

Regular seats aren't what are going to bring us the real £££ it's corporate hospitality - thats's where we need to up our game.

[TomYam]

2 hours ago, Wandy said:

 

Do they have bigger local catchment areas? We have an entire quarter of the country to ourselves, something that they dont. If we were to be successful too I could see us having a significant following north of the border too.

Entire quarter of the country?

 

I believe Northumberland & Durham comprises 6% of England's geographical area. The population of our region is no more than 4% of England. Our remoteness (like Devon & Cornwall) is both a strength and weakness; a strong local platform but far fewer tourists and less money swishing about.

 

Your final sentence is interesting. There is massive potential to expand our fanbase in Scotland. We really should be the best supported English club in Scotland due to proximity and history. 

 

Back to sweet spots, I've long thought 72,00 is an ideal capacity. 

 

[Whitley mag]

4 hours ago, Danh1 said:

There’s about 600 tickets available in level 7 for the Bromley game. Do appreciate that it’s just after Christmas and quite pricey for a cup game against unglamorous opposite, mind 

I would imagine these will go by the time game comes round, but telling that there not returns by Bromley so we’ve probably shifted aprox 46k with their larger allocation.

 

Pretty impressive considering the opposition, however in a way it confirms my point about supply and demand, if this was Man U, Arsenal, Liverpool they would be not be slow moving tickets they would be gone.

 

We are a huge club but outside Mancs, Arsenal and Liverpool not sure anyone in this country fills a 70k plus stadium regularly, possibly Spurs who have a huge waiting list. Taking this Bromley game as an example we’d now potentially have another 23.5k tickets to shift with a 75k stadium.

 

The 2 NW clubs are in split city’s, but they’re significantly bigger population wise and more importantly surrounded by densely populated big towns packed full of their supporters.

 

I agree Scotland and potentially Scandinavia, Ireland are areas we can benefit from in terms of growing our wider fanbase, but to the level of the 3 clubs mentioned  will take years.

 

I think outside the clubs membership data, it would be really useful if they created a season ticket waiting list to gauge what the demand is really like from fans who want to be there every week.

 

 

Edited 16 hours ago by Whitley mag

[TheBrownBottle]

I’d build as big as the site allows.  You simply close off upper tiers for early cup games against lower league opposition.  A successful (as in winning things) NUFC sells out 80k for me - provided pricing is reasonable.  With a massive ground, you can milk the corporate but also hold say 15k tickets in the upper tiers for low income supporters.  60-65k keeps it as it is - it locks out huge swathes of low income supporters.  It’s meant to be the people’s game.  

[TheBrownBottle]

1 hour ago, TomYam said:

Entire quarter of the country?

 

I believe Northumberland & Durham comprises 6% of England's geographical area. The population of our region is no more than 4% of England. Our remoteness (like Devon & Cornwall) is both a strength and weakness; a strong local platform but far fewer tourists and less money swishing about.

 

Your final sentence is interesting. There is massive potential to expand our fanbase in Scotland. We really should be the best supported English club in Scotland due to proximity and history. 

 

Back to sweet spots, I've long thought 72,00 is an ideal capacity. 

 

Effectively Cumbria and N Yorks gets added to that catchment area as well as the borders - unless Berwick, Carlisle, the Smoggies or Mackems suddenly become successful.  I don’t think our catchment area is limited to Nland and Durham. 

[Stifler]

7 hours ago, Danh1 said:

There’s about 600 tickets available in level 7 for the Bromley game. Do appreciate that it’s just after Christmas and quite pricey for a cup game against unglamorous opposite, mind 

You do realise that’s because they are concession tickets, right?

If they were ordinary tickets, they would be gone. A similar scenario has happened in every game since the takeover.

[Hudson]

8 hours ago, midds said:

Probably being a bit bullish here but I think we sell out 80k against virtually any opponent right now. The demand is there right now imo, people want to see this team and as we improve it'll only get a more and more desirable ticket to have. Bromley at home in the cup went to ballot. How many missed out? How many didn't apply because they knew they'd probably miss out? 

 

Confident we'd fill 80k virtually every game

If I could get tickets, I would travel from the North West for games.

[Danh1]

1 hour ago, Stifler said:

You do realise that’s because they are concession tickets, right?

If they were ordinary tickets, they would be gone. A similar scenario has happened in every game since the takeover.

Not sure the link will work, but they aren’t concession tickets. Usually you get the odd one or two dotted about but there’s hundreds of all ticket types available.

 

https://book.newcastleunited.com/en-GB/events/newcastle united v bromley fc/2025-1-12_15.00/st james park?hallmap

 

Hopefully means some on here can get a ticket.

 

Want to add that to only have that many available isn’t a bad thing or embarrassing or anything, in the past we’d probably scrape 40k against someone like Bromley. Even 40k is a good gate, particularly at 30 bar a ticket.

 

 

Edited 12 hours ago by Danh1

[Tsunami]

There’s something about playing in a full stadium. It affects both home and away teams, it creates better atmosphere.

 

I think we’d struggle to get an extra 20k there every match. For for all those saying they’ll go given a chance, I’d be fairly confident that after a few years of not winning a lot would pack in any ST they had and would pick and choose individual games to attend.

 

I reckon 70k would be about right and that would be with a view for catering for non football events as well. It has to be multi purpose.

[Wallsendmag]

11 hours ago, Whitley mag said:

The sweet spot in terms of supply and demand is probably 65k for us, undoubtedly we could fill 75k for big games, but not sure 10k empty seats would be a good thing personally for some games.

 

I don’t think only going to 65k justifies staying at SJP though, 13k extra seats with more Corporate boxes, better facilities, acoustics, sight lines and being able to host other events is reason enough to still leave and will still bring huge revenue uplift.

 

In an ideal world we go to 65k, with the potential to expand to 75k if demand warrants it. Very tempting to just say build it so everyone can go when they want, but the reality of a stadium to big wont be good commercially in long term and could leave us with a white elephant down the line.

 

Think 65k is underselling ourselves and I'm not sure I'd like to get rid of SJP for around 10k general sale seats when you account for more corporate seating in a new stadium.

 

A poor West Ham are filling 65k every week, and our fanbase is far bigger than there's. I'd like to think we have more ambition than that. Also I'd be amazed if our fanbase hasn't grown considerably in the next decade and beyond. It already is.

 

70/75k would be the ideal capacity for a new stadium. I think that more or less future proofs us and means that looking ahead, if they change the PSR rules and infrastructure becomes part of it, we won't be affected. Personally I think we'd fill that for every game except maybe early round cup games against lower league opposition and even if there was a couple of thousand empty seats for Fulham or Bournemouth at home that's a price worth paying for not locking out 1000s most other weeks. Every supporter who can't get in is lost revenue for the club after all.

 

Looking at Spurs, I wonder if they'll be regretting only going to 62k considering they currently have 80,000 on a waiting list for a season ticket.

[Matt1892]

29 minutes ago, Tsunami said:

There’s something about playing in a full stadium. It affects both home and away teams, it creates better atmosphere.

 

I think we’d struggle to get an extra 20k there every match. For for all those saying they’ll go given a chance, I’d be fairly confident that after a few years of not winning a lot would pack in any ST they had and would pick and choose individual games to attend.

 

I reckon 70k would be about right and that would be with a view for catering for non football events as well. It has to be multi purpose.

It is a valid point talking about a few years on, as I don’t think selling out will

be a problem initially but is something we could see in the future depending on how the team is performing on the pitch.

 

You would presume that if that did happen it would be a slow decline in attendance which will allow the club to manage it accordingly.

[Keegans Export]

I have two concerns about the belief that "we'd sell out 75-80k etc"

 

Firstly, in the future one of three things will probably happen. Either we'll stay roughly where we are now, always in the discussion for European places but not getting there every year and not challenging for titles, we'll drop off and be more of an upper mid-table side occasionally challenging for Europe or we'll end up consistently in the Champions League places or at least getting European football more often than not. With the first two, I think demand will drop off as the excitement wears off. The third option obviously makes that less likely but you still have the issue of playing Barcelona in a CL QF on the Wednesday then following it up with Ipswich at home.

 

Secondly, there's an issue with using the ballot numbers. At the moment I'd say you're looking at probably 1/3 chance per game at best, maybe even less. But if that suddenly became 4/5? We've got 5 home games in less than a month coming up, if you'd been successful in the ballot for the first three, how likely are you to go for the remaining two? I'm not sure whether I'm making a good point there or not.

[nufcjmc]

While they talk about a once in a lifetime spend and getting it right if we move surely you do the design footprint allowing to have a design which you can expand if the need arises.

Hard to know what we could fill consistently for most fixtures as don't know what the % of season ticket and general sale will be not having it and needing it though as you got the figure wrong is more damaging income wise than over shooting the fugure and needs to be  a stadium we need to "grow" into. 

[TBG]

It's maybe because this project will likely cost hundreds of billions, but I get the feeling the club have done the maths and hold the data to work out what the demand is, and what capacity needs to be to still turn a profit even if we aren't at max capacity every week. 

[et tu brute]

8 minutes ago, TBG said:

It's maybe because this project will likely cost hundreds of billions, but I get the feeling the club have done the maths and hold the data to work out what the demand is, and what capacity needs to be to still turn a profit even if we aren't at max capacity every week. 

hundreds of billions, is it going to be crusted in diamonds and rubys?

[macphisto]

If we went for 80,000 and demand was not there after a few years then you could easily throttle supply to keep demand high by having say 10,000-15,000 seats set aside for school kids/other groups at £10 a ticket. Gives the club good PR by allowing under privileged groups into the ground, ensures future supporters and would be the best thing you could do for the atmosphere.

[tgarve]

17 minutes ago, macphisto said:

If we went for 80,000 and demand was not there after a few years then you could easily throttle supply to keep demand high by having say 10,000-15,000 seats set aside for school kids/other groups at £10 a ticket. Gives the club good PR by allowing under privileged groups into the ground, ensures future supporters and would be the best thing you could do for the atmosphere.

The best thing you can do for the atmosphere to bring 15000 school kids into the ground? 
we ain’t the mackems