Quote wire-quin="wire-quin"Both issues you have presented are nonsense
Last year half the season was Sat and half Sun. The crowds were bigger on the Sat
All local players were given season tickets with there club memberships. It was stated by the club only 100 used them on match days.'"
Mate - I am tired of you throwing this cack back at me, you have done it before. Wake up and smell the coffee.
This club has categorically disenfranchised the community game over a long, long period in the South.
How do I know - because I play in it and I speak to 100's of people in it every week. And I have for a long, long time. Bridges burnt over 10 years are not rebuilt over one season.
Can't you see that the biggest argument for building a community based RL club is based on the fact that NO other SL club plays games over the top of their community clubs fixtures. None. Nada.
Last years stats are completely skewed and not representative. The Saturday Wigan attendance was a freak opener, with more Wigan fans than Quins fans, plus a MASSIVE pre season push to get people in on free tickets. Also the community game hadn't started playing by then.
Inevitably if one plays Wigan, KR, Saints and Leeds on Sat's and then Cas, Cats and Bradford at the tail end of an increasingly poor season on Sundays, it's going to misrepresent the figures. Plus, seeing Paul Brown, icon of the community game and immensely well respected across it, disappear in weird circumstances mid season didn't engender a great spirit towards the club for the second half of the season.
Yes, more away fans come on Saturdays (further skewing the stats) but you do not build a club on away support.
As for the club saying that very few community clubs took advantage of the offer - they have no idea, they have never been good at keeping a CRM. It's just another knee jerk reaction to a short term perception of things not working, so we'll change it again. In the same way that they've changed ground, kit, name, staff, management, owner and attitude to community clubs for years and years and years.
A few other things - free tickets don't work in the long run. It's proven. They are valueless. Little Jimmy goes home to his mother and says - I have free tickets to Quins RL. How on earth do these tickets then ever have value? Once something is free, it's expected to be free forever. You can't attach value to it.
Cashback schemes to clubs have been tried and have worked in the past. Until the club lost the staff who put them in place and everything fell apart.....
WQ - please come back to me with some thought through, intellectual arguments instead of one off statements that you think are representative.
I don't expect a lot of sympathy for the community game on these boards - you are generally all hard core, die hard fans who come to games because you believe (like I do) that we have the best sporting product there is. But not many other Londoners agree with you and we need to embrace those that do. It's not an overnight project.....but the sooner the community game is respected and nurtured to come to games, the better.
This too might be stuck record, but believe me - in spite of their fans loving it, every Community Marketeer of every northern based club in the SL is p1ssing themselves laughing at our Saturday 3pm k.o.