I notice 3 of last nights games had 50k+ crowds and not playing at home there are West Ham, Newcastle and Man Utd with grounds that hold that or even more. Add in WHL when it’s finished and that’s 7 clubs with big grounds which they regularly fill. I used to think when we were a PL club that you needed a 40k capacity in order to compete but now it looks like even that is on the small size. Clubs will obviously have good or exceptional seasons, Leicester for instance, but they are not going to be able to consistently compete long term. Chelsea are still up there but even with the money available to them the are starting to look like also rans against the teams around them that have the bigger ground capacity. Having a big capacity clearly doesn’t guarantee success, Newcastle and Sunderland for instance, but that probably says more about their ownership.
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I refer to what Bayern Munich once said... We could charge Premier League prices for tickets yet whats an extra £2m to us
Ultimately I dont think it matters on the size of the ground in the Premier League; if TV Revenue wasnt so much then I'd say the Stadium was important
Just take Bournemouth for example; they've finished 9th | 12th | 12th in their last three seasons with the smallest (?) ground in Premier League history
But the point is true, with out external funding you could, with good managment and recruitment, survive with a C30k ground. To thrive with out external funding about 80k ground, near on a billion "fans" World wide and an official noodle partner in every country.
Burnley a probably a better example than Bournemouth then
third smallest attendance, one of the few clubs in the top two tiers with British owners... Got a spot in Europe last season
TV rights, sponsorship and prize money
I think that is before tickets are even considered
The truth is more nuanced. For example, what Gullivan really wanted, and got, from the OS was a big hospitality capacity, that is very profitable and they are -disgracefully - allowed to keep 100% of that revenue. The Valley's big weakness as an FAPL stadium is exactly that it has a low capacity fro prawn-sandwich customers. Again, this is relatively more important in London than in say Burnley, as the market for prawn-sandwich fans is bigger for a London club.
Otherwise 27,000 capacity is just fine in the FAPL. It is after all bigger than that of many clubs who were playing in the Europa League last week. The biggest stadium in the Czech Republic (Slavia Prague, now the de facto national stadium, where England will play in October) is 21,000.
No regulations about ground capacity is there?
Bournemouth's ground holds about 11,000 and they have no plans to expand.
It was 11 out of the 20 that would still have made a profit if zero tickets had been sold.
Who would want to go to a 20,30 40, 50 thousand capacity stadium and sit amongst an attendance of 2,3,4 thousand ? .. I have been to the 60,000 capacity Valley and been amongst the faithful (or daft) 3,4,000 who bothered to attend, it's almost soul destroying. Why are Spurs investing million upon million in their new stadium ?
To say that the millions to be made from ticket sales along with programmes, catering, sales from the club shop, the increasing amount of football tourism, corporate hospitality and such is irrelevant to the football business is just not so.
The idea that football be effectively played behind closed doors with canned crowd noise for the exclusive pleasure of TV viewers is just tosh. The fans make football, the noise, the jeers, the chants the applause. Mere TV viewing with canned applause could never replace the experience of attending a game along with thousands of other like minded people.
Football with few or no spectators at the 'ground' would be like the 'Trueman Show', a plastic version of reality.
American football is arguably the most televised sport on the planet. It is played in huge stadia before thousands of fans and this despite blanket coverage on tv and radio. The US owners are forever building temple like stadia with even more capacity than their existing ones.
Football, all spectator sport is not just about money, it's about the experience. Canny businessmen who own the majority of professional sports teams know this. These men both love the money and the game and as I typed above, the notion that they would forego the millions from attended games and just take the cash from TV and radio rights is just wrong wrong and wrong
to sell cheese?
You need spectators in the ground, it creates an atmosphere. For example our home game against Sunderland, big ground, lots of noise just seems to make the game better or should I say the matchday experience.
When i'm old, i certainly won't look back at the dismal years spent in league one. I'll remember the wins over the likes of Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs.
Convinced that if we didn't get Roland in as our owner, then Powell would've got us back there.
it was great being in the PL but let’s not kid ourselves, we were always too small to do anything but make up the numbers for a few years until the inevitable relegation happened. The day the ground expansion plans halted was probably the turning point
Sunderland
Newcastle
Leeds
Sheffield United
Sheffield Wednesday
Wolves
Etc etc Etc
Have all spent conciderable time outside of the top flight with large grounds.
Sky money and sponsorships count far more than stadium size.
Were did you get the idea that football is going to be played behind closed doors with canned applause ?
However i disagree we just made up the numbers. If we hadn't sold Parker we'd likely have got into Europe that season, then who knows what could've happened from there. Might have only been for 1 season, but we might have grown, got a 40k stadium and been perennial 7-10th placers. Who knows.