Those regular season ticket prices for Tallaght Stadium represent a €30 drop in price from last season and are part of an initiative the club has committed to in order to try to increase attendances and attract new fans who will stay for the long-term.
“The drop is part of the strategic plan to increase attendances,” says board director
Mark Lynch. “Two years ago we introduced kids go free so on buying an adult season ticket you got up to three kids to go free. The idea was to get children into going to live games as early as possible and that was very successful. Not only did we sell more tickets than before, obviously you’re giving away up to three kids tickets with an adult, but we also increased the value in revenue from them. It wasn’t just that we sold more physical tickets, we sold more money’s worth of tickets.
“That initiative was to incentivise and encourage young families to come to Tallaght Stadium. We’ve obviously got a fantastic stadium which is very family friendly. We’ve got all the facilities of a modern stadium as well as parking, the Luas on our doorstep, bus routes as well so no blocks for a family to enjoy a night out. So for an adult and three kids at that price of €210 you’re in effect paying roughly €15 for four people to go to a live game, per match. That showed us that there is a marketplace if the price is right.”
Last season Rovers had around 2,000 season tickets in circulation and although a portion of those are given out for free to players, academy players and partner clubs, the figures are still significant. With the introduction of the south stand, Tallaght Stadium now has a capacity of 8,000 and Rovers came close to filling it last season for the Dublin derby when 7,021 turned out to watch Stephen Bradley’s side end their losing run against rivals Bohemians.
Lynch says that dropping prices still presents quite a risk for the Tallaght club. Indeed Rovers made losses of just under €100,000 in the year to the end of last November,
as reported in The Irish Times last month.
“We kind of broke even last year, the season 2019, but the previous year The Irish Times reported on losses so it’s not like we’re sitting on a gold mine in the bank and sell things cheaper than we would otherwise,” Lynch says.
“We’re just trying to build on it and building on it is building more people, not putting the price up. More people at a lower price is better than the same people at a higher price if you get it right. If you drop it, as we have by €30, and you get enough extra people, which is doable considering the season we had, we’ll have beaten where we’ve started. We’ve gone with a strategy that is a risk because we’ve dropped the price. So if we get the same people buying season tickets this year as last year then we’ve lost a lot of money but we’re taking the risk that we’re going to get more people and that many more that it will still make more money than if we kept the price the same or increased it a little bit.”
And while it might indeed be a risk for Rovers, those sorts of risks are second nature to League of Ireland clubs as the battle against the balance sheets continues.
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