Sitting in on Friday evening ahead of the Mrs’ graduation ball at the weekend, I was scratching my head wondering what to write about regarding Villa. As we have an international break, and there isn’t a whole lot happening at B6, I really was struggling to think about a topic to cover. Till, strangely enough, the Mrs called me over asking me to look at an email she had received.

Doesn’t sound like much to mention, but when I looked at the email she had been sent, it was from Aston Villa advertising hospitality seats on coupon site LivingSocial. Villa are offering a hospitality ticket for the game against Swansea for £99 rather than the normal £210 that they usually charge.

On the face of it, it just seems like another way to desperately attract people to the game as currently Villa fans are staying away in their droves. What it said to me though was two-fold. Let me explain.

Making A Silk Purse Out Of A Sow’s Ear

Firstly, whilst I understand the reasoning for discounting tickets for the game (Empty seats, my lord?), it actually is frustrating me quite a lot. For those of us who have invested in season tickets in order to loyally support the club, it seems every game is having some kind of discount applied to it, hospitality seat or not.

It’s rational enough to try and fill spaces that aren’t actually having anyone sitting in them, but pretty irritating for those of us who paid out from some kind of misguided loyalty. Will we get a rebate on what we’ve paid? I doubt it.

It all feels a little wrong, and it makes me wonder if I am actually going to get a better deal next year by not renewing and buying tickets game to game.

Secondly, the question I am asking looking at a discount hospitality ticket is “Who is this targeted at?” Are the club looking at selling tickets to corporates? I ask because I can’t see a normal Villa fan who currently stays away from the ground because “normal” seating is too expensive, suddenly being enraptured by the idea of “a nice meal” to go with a game of football. It’s out of the box thinking, sure, but it’s misguided and missing the point.

The whole manner of this “offer” leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of people like me who want to feel like they get some value in paying for a season ticket. Sure, there were “extras” such as AVTV and stickers, but I don’t actually care about them.

AVTV is hardly the most well produced package, and if I want to attend a press conference, I can go there myself as a journalist. No added value for me.

Free stickers? I’m about 25 years too old at 32 to be bothered about that, and a “free pie” is hardly what I would call appetising given the cost compared to people who wait week to week to get tickets.

Is Anybody Lerning Something?

As this season has gone on, I’m feeling disconnected from the club in a big way, and this is from a guy who can attend press conferences when he wants, knows people at the club, and has a whole host of numbers of players and former players in his mobile. For the first time in the tenure of Randy running the club, I’m starting to feel uneasy about how things are being managed.

From the knowledge of what has gone on before, I know it has hardly been the best managed organisation. Picking Houllier via a pile of CVs and ticking boxes was about as lazy as HR can get. Anyone with a degree of rationality knows that, on the balance of things, employing an older manager generally means more experience and thus more trophies. Overlooking heart problems that were documented and still affected by stress whilst Gerard was in the job was riding luck to say the least.

Letting McDonald dilly-dally about whether he wanted the job made the club look amateurish.

Appointing McLeish to the furore of fans signalled that the board were single-minded in their view and that the fans opinion really counted for nothing at all. Protests before a manager even starts is a new thing to me.

Now I’m not saying the fans should be running the club, as this is a privately owned business, but I do think ignoring your customer base is a rookie mistake, no matter the ownership. Customers, by their very nature, are intrinsic to the success of your club but, as we are seeing across many clubs and not just Aston Villa, the fixation seems more targetted at corporate sales and TV money than attracting your average Brummie. Big mistake.

It’s great to have extra money in these areas, but without the fans, the club is absolutely nothing. Sure, it is a series of buildings and some employees, but it isn’t anything that evokes passion. Under the current regime, the passion is being sucked out at an alarming rate.

Disconnected From Reality – Anyone Got A Bucket Of Water?

Where’s the passion in watching highly paid players play dull and unattractive football? Where’s the interest in a financial rebuilding season for the average fan? Sure, Lerner needs to balance the books, but why does it seem to fall at the feet of the average bloke on the street to prop that mess up? First we are bailing inept banks out, now we’re bailing inept football clubs out. Both of them seem equally well managed. Pardon the sarcasm.

If O’Neill messed up the books in the view of the club, then the board should sort the problem out. Don’t leave it to us to keep paying the same money for a decreasingly interesting product because, one day, you’ll realise there’s nobody watching the game anymore. Free choices and all.

Would you or I expect to have our mortgage paid for if we messed up our business we owned because we let a manager at our firm mess things up? No, we’d work out what to do, and we’d change things accordingly, at our cost.

If you were a brickie, and times were tough, would you just slap together houses in a haphazard way? Or do you think that would create more problems and more lost business? I’m sure you get my point.

Of course you wouldn’t, so I fail to understand why things are so different at Villa. If the club messes up, the club should bail things out, not just attempt to balance it against some loans that still need repaying. How is that funding the club? It’s mortgaging it, even if it is to yourself.

It’s one thing wanting to make money out of a project, but this is football. In the current market, treating football like a “normal” business is akin to suicide. Why? Well how can you compete with someone who has 20 times as much money as you unless you have a creatively brilliant group of people?

More to the point, where’s the fun in supporting a horse that is, minus this group of brilliant people, more than likely going to fail to place highly?

This is precisely why there’s apathy amongst the fans – paying more money for less chance of anything happening. Would you be ok paying more for a lottery ticket if knew you had less chance of winning? Of course not. At some point the game has to change.

In case football hasn’t noticed, the economy is on it’s knees. Discounting a product is one thing, but not if it alienates your core of supporters who pay for the season tickets. So I see the point but I kind of wonder just how much you really value those of us that stuck by the club, even after getting treated badly. We’re not infinitely patient, so don’t expect us to be here forever taking it.

So if you want to save money by chopping things Randy, at least give us something to smile about. This season, I’ve found my season ticket pretty poor value for money. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Leave a Reply