Leicester crowd ?

[UTB70]

Theres a solid 29-30k boro fans that turn up for big champo and cup games Youre tellinf me another 5k of boro fans wouldnt comw out the woodwork to see man utd, man city, Newcastle, Liverpool and many other big teams if we were competitive in the prem with new impetus and hope sparked by say new mega bucks owners?Add say 4k away fans from the aforementioned clubs and thats pushing towards 40k already. Only time it would dip is for less glamourpus games like say bournemouth or a brentford type of opposition. Saying that i canr see club expanding anyways with gibbos limited finances and championship status.

 

[Corcaigh_the_Cat]

Theres a solid 29-30k boro fans that turn up for big champo and cup games Youre tellinf me another 5k of boro fans wouldnt comw out the woodwork to see man utd, man city, Newcastle, Liverpool and many other big teams if we were competitive in the prem with new impetus and hope sparked by say a new mega bucks owners?Add say 4k away fans from the aforementioned clubs and thats pushing towards 40k already. Only time it would dip is for less glamourpus games like say bournemouth or a brentford type of opposition. Daying that i canr see club expanding anyways with gibbos limited finances and championship staus.

We'd easily do it in the current football supporting climate, and we could sell another 5k tickets to the away sides and they'd be taken up.

 

[Redwurzel]

Our current capacity is just right for us in my opinion - our catchment area is around 450k and in general the population of our catchment area is slightly declining, opposed to most areas of the UK where the population is increasing. I don't think we will ever pull in thousands of fans with no connection to the catchment area. There is a Teesside diaspora of peole born/lived in the area who live away and they form the bulk of our National fan base.

Look at Leicester City deemed same size club as us - their catchment area is surely Leicestershire, with a growing population of over 650k.

 

[Air Resistance]

As much as I admire the optimism, I'm finding a lot of the posts in this thread totally out of sync with what I think reality is in terms of expanding the stadium.

Last time we were in the Prem we averaged 30k attendances. This was limited in a few games due to lower away crowds, but generally speaking the majority of games anyone who wanted a ticket could have got one. This is with the novelty factor of being the first season back too, and we know from our previous spell, that wears off eventually when people start taking it for granted.

If we were selling out week in week out, great I’d be all for it, but I’ve sat there in the the Strachen reign and remember how quickly it can all fall apart and leave the place very sparse.

Best and cheapest thing they could do to maximise the extra 1.5k seats would be to work with the Red Faction to reconfigure the stadium back to the south stand being the away end. To do this you’d probably have to accept a huge number of people being very annoyed at being displaced, and the fact it would probably negatively impact the atmosphere not having home fans at both ends.

There is no option worth doing that would be significantly better than we have now.

Stadiums sizes are not a ‘build them and they will come’ type business. Thousands more people won’t start coming to games simply because we have a bigger stadium.

Lastly - forgetting the fan/football element - not a single business analyst would ever recommend building bigger for the sake of it from a financial point of view. Profits are maximised by controlling supply. It’s no coincidence almost all new stadia in England since the emirates have been built lower capacity than they could potentially fill. Teams often also cap Season ticket numbers as the profit margins for match by match tickets where there is high demand is massively bigger.