Stadium expansion

[Orange Box]

There were more cars, fans etc in the 70's when standing was allowed and we had the high flying Revie team. Sometimes it would take well over an hour to inch our way out of the car park (if you were lucky). Many a time we would just put the radio on and listen to the footy results/reports and just wait our turn. A little patience was all that was required

You had a car in the 70s? How posh was that.

[Lumiukko]

Quite right, extra bums on seats is extra revenue which can feed back into the team. But I also do see the "let's ensure PL survival" angle too.

Some back of the fagpacket maths here. But in season 2019/2020, the average ticket at a premier league game (across all teams and ticket types), was £32. Two seasons later, for arguments sake, let's make it £35. A bump to 60k capacity would be an additional 20k seats, adding £700k to a matchday ticket revenue. 19 games a season is an extra £13,300,000 on top of the existing revenue from the other 40k seats.

Of course there's additional overheads with a boost in capacity, like maintenance costs, stewards and policing, etc but that's probably offset somewhat by the income from concessions and merch on matchday. Add to that extra gates from cup runs and so on and it makes a big difference.

I'm probably way off the mark with the numbers above as I heard last year we missed out on something like £45 million in gate receipts for the near 40k capacity we have. But you can see the point.

[Norm]

The biggest ever crowd at ER was 57,892 against Sunderland 15/3/67 for an FA Cup 5th round replay but, since then, the crowd has quite rarely exceeded 40,000. Stadium changes allowed an increase over the old capacity despite having to put in seats but I honestly don't know whether further expansion is going to be worth the cost even if we do stay in the EPL.

[Norm]

btw I got my info from the following source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... ball_clubs

- some cases are amazing, including ours I think.