Floodlight Football At Priestfield

[Kent_UckyFriedGills]

More great work from the Club with cheaper Tickets for home games on a Tuesday night,as a part of Floodlight Football fans can purchase Tickets cheaper.£15 for Adults,Concessions £10,and U18`s £5.

http://www.gillinghamfootballclub.com/n ... 91453.aspx

[gillsfan1066]

That sounds great, but I find it hard to fathom out why a team at the TOP of it's Divison hasn't got fans beating down the doors for tickets, you really would expect a gate of 6 or 7,000 for Tuesday night games and 7 or 8,000 for Saturday games especially with the fall weather being here.
Probably need to change the players names to unpronounceable, Serbian, African, Turkish or Italian names and games will be a sell out.

[Kent_UckyFriedGills]

That sounds great, but I find it hard to fathom out why a team at the TOP of it's Divison hasn't got fans beating down the doors for tickets, you really would expect a gate of 6 or 7,000 for Tuesday night games and 7 or 8,000 for Saturday games especially with the fall weather being here.
Probably need to change the players names to unpronounceable, Serbian, African, Turkish or Italian names and games will be a sell out.

I agree we should really be getting 7,000 with us being top.

[Rimshot]

As I have said many times you don't just attract new supporters by results these days , with so much else for people to do at weekends. From personal experience, as someone who lives away from Medway, I can say the club is not the easiest to contact or to 'buy' from.
I think the customer service is adequate at best, more often it seems indifferent.
Whatever your views of our esteemed Chairman it's hard to argue that we have established a reputation as a welcoming place and there are also practical issues around the location of the ground for access, parking and local facilities like shopping. The case for relocation is self- evident but you need a cooperative approach to get the necessary support from local officials at various levels. I'm afraid Mr S doesn't often come across as the co-operative type.
I'm sure it will attract howls of outrage but I would offer MK Dons as an example, not necessarily of its initial ethics but certainly in terms of the practicalities of re-siting a club.
MkDons formed close alliances with local government, business and influencers and now has a great stadium in the middle of a retail/ parking site. Plenty of other clubs have achieved much the same outcome.
In addition our marketing is abject. I've been a supporter for over 50 years; the club has all my details on its files but I've never had a single proactive contact from them. I get stuff from MKD all the time.
We don't need to remove to another area altogether, we do need another site in Medway. It would take investment, commitment, ambition , time and negotiating skills. Hard to do from the desert.

[Robpthegills]

I would hope for bigger crowds but lets have some reality.

The chairman clealy lost interest in the club at one point. In fact, was it not just 4 or 5 years ago he admitted he had not paid attention and had not given the club all that he should have.

During this time a lot of fans lost interest and have alienated themselves from Mr Scally. I am not making this right or wrong just saying it how I see it.

Too suddenly expect everyone after just 7 games to go, oh you know what I am going back, everything is peachy again. To get the crowds back in regularly at decent numbers will take a bit more time than just 7 games. I want to see Priestfield packed and if we carry on as we are then we will see more people but give it a bit of time.

Where I sit in the RE there was 5 people missing on saturday for the Blackpool game, myself included, purely because by pure coincidence all 5 of us in the same row were on various holidays. That said I think they count a ST holder as being there whether they actually are or not.

[Garawa]

Rimshot, whilst I would have agreed with you when you stated about the club not engaging enough with fans, I can't now. I am very impressed with the work done over the summer after the the club brought in Charlotte Richardson from the Kent FA as head of marketing. She has engaged fans on social media like never before and there are many testimonies of people praising the club going above and beyond in doing something that perhaps they didn't need or have to do. This will help but it will take time...a long time! As for the people not using social media most marketing opportunities the club put forward I receive by email so not sure why you do not.

In past the club has mailshot the houses immediately around the stadium with free tickets enclosed and had very little uptake! I'm sorry Gillsfan, as far as I am concerned its a measure of people's apathy and laziness why we aren't getting more through the gate. You see it everywhere from how people drive to how people ask a question on a message board as they are too lazy to Google the answer for themselves (most notably was "What time is kick-off Saturday" on a Gills Facebook page - 3pm as normal)!!! Why go on a cold Tuesday evening if there is a Champions League game on TV? Why bother trying to find a parking space or sit in traffic if you can watch the lunch time and then the 5pm games on TV? How many football fans (not devotees like us but ordinary fans) know how we are doing if they only watch Premiership games? How can they justify spending £20 each on a ticket in a more deprived area of Kent ahead of other more important things (hopefully this initiative will help with that)? These along with the fact Kent isn't a hot bed of sport in general let alone football are the main reasons as it barely changes whatever division we are in. Now get to a position of being close to getting into the top flight and suddenly we are under everyone's radar and then Kent will attempt to come out in force!

As for MK Dons I think it is a disaster and I really don't know who is subsidising it all. They had 5,600 fans for the visit of Cardiff and on TV all you could see was entire stands empty. They want to make it bigger (part of the World Cup bid) but they can barely fill a quarter of it now. Moving to whole new area with a fancy stadium and the appetite has clearly vanished is replicated up and down the country at most clubs not just us. The only answer is to get in the Premier League!

[baronnight]

I think the MK Cardiff game was in the league cup, never attracts large crowds until the later rounds. their last league game against Birmingham had a crowd of 14,626 which is much larger than anything we could ever hope to achieve.

[Garawa]

Was it? There was a match of theirs at the start of the season the the Football League show and you could barely see anyone so not sure what that match was then.

[Rimshot]

Some disaster ! Fabulous stadium, Championship football, league gates this season 10765,11035 and 14626, recent 30,000 sell out v Wolves, attracting 20k to 30k crowds for Northampton Saints big games and hosting a Pool of the Rugby World Cup.
Yep, complete rubbish ...

[baronnight]

They had a Tuesday night cup game against Leyton Orient with 5,444 which is our normal Saturday league crowd, unless like last Saturday they give away a thousand freebie's and even a lot of those didn't show up.

[Rimshot]

...and the last time we had 10,000 in the ground was ?

[Garawa]

Those figures seem a bit high unless the ground holds 50,000. I definitely saw that awful Football League show on C5 showing totally empty stands with a few away fans at one end. Anyway, it doesn't matter and it kind of proves my point, we generally fill HALF the ground and that seems a bit difficult at times. Getting a third of the crowd they got against Wolves in a lavish new stadium suggests a degree of apathy there also.

[lidbid46]

Do any other season ticket holders get a little fed up with all these offers? We have already paid for our tickets and gain nothing from the offers. Most of the extras that we have are useless to me such as under 12 etc. We are even expected to pay full price for the Paint Pot cup which seems particularly unfair.

[Rimshot]

How on earth you can rubbish gates in five figures when we can't even muster 7000 is beyond me. These are official, published data. I was at the MK vs Wolves game ( which was a virtual sell-out) and, yes, they have increased stadium capacity to cater for the Rugby World Cup.
Remember that they have worked from a zero fan base up to the present level over a period where we have struggled to support Championship football. Not everything about the set up is right yet but crucially the Chairman has produced a business model that doesn't depend solely on the Football team.

[Garawa]

I'm not disputing that at all but their 5-figure gates are not much above their average last season of 9,500 in a league of big sides. Comparing us in League 1 is a poor example. If their gates have increased by a couple of thousand in a standard interest match then, by comparison, we would only expect another 1,500 should we go up!

I repeat; we are not in the Championship, we don't have a bigger average gate, we don't have a shiny new stadium so why would we get more through the door? If they can get 30,000 in one league game why are they getting 10 and 11k in other games. At least our gates are a bit more stable but both clubs are showing the appetite is only there if there is a big draw opposition regardless of divisions played in. Perhaps our initiative might work but we won't know for a while.