United announce new stadium plans

No way are the finances there to build a new stadium and then give away 5-10k tickets every games. Jeez if life was only that simple. Finances will be tight plus we need to provide finance to remain / get competitive on the pitch. Training facilities upgrade and youth development etc.
 
MancunianAngels said:
As I said on another thread about this, United have the opportunity to do something really meaningful with extra seats.

If they want to fill it, make sure a good 5 or 10,000 tickets are in the hands of Greater Manchester schools and families. Give kids the opportunity who live round the corner to attend most games. Make it as affordable as possible.

For all the talk of community engagement and local regeneration, that would have a generational impact more than anything else they have proposed so far. It would create a culture of young lads and lasses going to the match together and would ultimately benefit the atmosphere 5 or 10 years down the line.
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It's what I'd have done if I owned the club. May have day dreamt something like that a few times :lol:
 
parmenio said:
Naming rights will no doubt come into play. Have to at this level. 90k capacity seems about right imo.
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Maybe so. I think for United, naming rights could be worth as much as 10m a season. When you look at other deals, which are often packaged as part of a bigger sponsorship deal with shirts etc., the top clubs have been getting around 5m a season. City apparently got 20m for theirs but that was obviously crooked as feck. For example, Barca’s new shirt deal includes naming rights for the stadium and is valued at about 5-7m in the deal.

United have always been trailblazers in the commercial department, keeping pace or outstripping their rivals despite woeful returns on the field. The club just negotiated the most lucrative, shirt only sponsorship deal in sports; despite not being a title contender domestically or in Europe for a decade. When you add up what the clubs gets for its training kit, sleeve sponsor, main sponsor and kit manufacturer deals, it dwarfs everybody else.

Just imagine the commercial income this club could generate, in this modern environment, with a successful team on the pitch. If we were competing for the title every year, and winning PL’s and CLs, the amount of money United could demand from sponsors would set a new benchmark.

The Glazers were apparently happy being at near near the top of the pile despite being crap, but they haven’t even come close to maxing out the commercial potential of the club. The funny thing is, they’ve spent a ton of money on players - self generated - which should’ve translated to a decent return on the field and commercial growth; but they spent it so poorly.

How they’ve run the club makes no sense. If they had spent a lot less on players and pocketed the commercial returns, it would be understandable. Gross but understandable. Instead, they’ve spent a fortune on crap players, and hocked us up to the eyeballs in debt, and barely grown the commercial arm in over a decade (comparative to standard industry growth) by putting a shit team on the field. All they needed to do was put the best DoF and CEO and other technical execs in place, and they’d likely have a much stronger commercial product, less debt, a successful team, and significantly more asset value.

That path is only just being embarked on by Ratcliffe. The Glazer kids are terrible business men, and they know nothing about football. You could at least acknowledge if they were great business men but despicable human beings. Instead they’ve leeched off a club that they have financially driven into the ground compared to what its potential is.
 
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MancunianAngels said:
This is absolute nonsense.

Kids will usually support who their parents support. If what you were saying was correct, you wouldn't get teams like Oldham getting crowds of 8,000 in Non League. You wouldn't get clubs in the Championship with crowds of 30,000. You wouldn't get Newcastle with 50,000.

If local kids can't afford to attend matches, their relationship with the club becomes more strained. They're not going to watch city all of a sudden though.

There's more chance the ground becomes a Soccer Aid experience when nobody can afford to go every week and the ground becomes full of tourists.

It's also funny how the club has funds to buy Antony for 100 million and Mount for 65 million. Its funny how people demand the club spend 300 million on a group of players they'll probably want sold 6 months later. Yet when it comes to lowering ticket prices, that's simply not possible.
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Nobody is arguing it shouldn't be more affordable for kids to attend matches, but that's a different argument to spending hundreds of millions on a new stadium and letting thousands and thousands of tickets go free every week. That's just economically illiterate.

Also kids ARE attracted to success. There's many City shirts being work in parks across the county now, just as there was in the 90s and 2000s in places with no particular connection with Manchester or a family heritage of supporting United. Same with Liverpool in the 70s and 80s where kids grew up in Suffolk, Devon and Kent massive Liverpool fans.

That's how new fans are made. Not everyone inherrits automatically their club from their parents. Most 'new' fans probably do not and that's been the case since at least Liverpool's success way back when. The vast majority of the explosion in our fanbase came from kids with absolutely no connection to the city and with no connection to United through family ties.

Nobody is arguing that kids should not get massively discounted tickets, nor the importance of local children actively engaging in the club. But outlaying money on the stadium then deliberately effectively rejecting potential income you'd raise from that investment by giving thousands upon thousands of tickets away for free is ridiculous.

You grow the wider fanbase through being successful. Liverpool, ourselves and City prove that. City to a much lesser extent of course. But if they keep winning they will continue to grow in popularity among the younger generation.

You aren't going to expand the fan base by assuming there's no point as kids wil just follow who their parents do and limit income by giving away free tickets. Because unless kids have a reason to attend, free or not, they won't.

Church is free every week but until kids see their classmates wearing Jesus merchandise every week in the playground and start thinking it's cool of trendy to be into that stuff, it won't matter. Kids will come to the club same as they did in 90s and 2000s. And that wasn't because they suddenly remembered their dad supported us, or the appeal of the club being less likely to invest and become successful in the first place by giving away massive amounts of matchday revenue every week
 
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