Home Park attendance after Phase 1

[DartPilgrim]

I wish you were right, but I can't for the life of me see how you would be.

There's a precedent here - there's no reason to think it'd be any different.

The people of Plymouth, by and large, don't give a sh*t about their team and, sadly, probably never will. For me it's linked to a general lack of civic/local pride, but that's probably a debate for another thread.

http://european-football-statistics.co. ... b/swac.htm

So umm, I guess the people of Swansea also didn't give a poo about their team for the entire period from 1984-2005 when they averaged 4750 in the vetch field which held 12000?
You're argument is blown out of the water a little bit because there is a team who had minimal success for that period and had a lower average attendance than us. Obviously during that period the people of Swansea didn't give a poo about their team, I expect there were natives of Swansea just like you telling not to build the liberty stadium because no one in Swansea gave a poo and they never would.
Even when they reached the championship their average didn't increase above 15000 until they had a sniff of promotion

But hang on... Their average over each of the last 6 seasons has been over 20,000....but I thought they didn't give a poo??!

What a great example Swansea are UTL , should Argyle get promoted to the Championship at the end of this season , we will have a capacity of around 17,900 which would enable our club to match or better Swansea's average attendances from their last 2 seasons in the Championship which were around 15,500 . Should we then achieve the impossible of making it to the Premier League before phase 2 is complete ( which would bring our capacity to over 20,000 , i believe , not too far from Swansea's capacity of 21,500 ), then we would have to console ourselves with the something like £90,000,000 is it ?, despite not being able to accommodate the extra 4,000 or so fans for our 19 home games .

 

[JannerinCardiff]

To me we need to walk before we run. My hope is that we can become a stable championship side. It interesting that the average crowd in the championship last season was just short of 20,000. That realistically is what we are competing against.. so I think we need a ground a bit bigger than that, say 22k to compete if we are ambitious and not just looking at the short term.

It’s interesting that the 1st season we were last in the championship we had some good crowds with 20,555 our highest (against Leeds). I think we’ve a slightly bigger fan base than then (just based on playi g decent football and progressively get better year in year since Adams took charge)

It’s my view that we need to at the very least fill in the corners before we make it to the championship to bring our capacity up to ~20k to maximise our revenue streams to compete in the championship.

 

[Green Matt]

The capacity we are getting is realistic and frankly good enough for what Argyle can be expected to achieve as things are. If we were to somehow reach the top flight then finding a few million to expand will surely not be a problem. There is potential for regular large crowds but this will not happen unless there are major backers and we also manage to out compete a lot of other clubs with wealthy backers. It is simply not on the cards as far as I can tell.

 

[Lundan Cabbie]

The capacity we are getting is realistic and frankly good enough for what Argyle can be expected to achieve as things are. If we were to somehow reach the top flight then finding a few million to expand will surely not be a problem. There is potential for regular large crowds but this will not happen unless there are major backers and we also manage to out compete a lot of other clubs with wealthy backers. It is simply not on the cards as far as I can tell.

Will it be that simple upon Argyle reaching the Premier League? You say “a few million” but will that be available? The club may well be expecting £100m+ income in that first season but they won’t get it up front. They could and probably will borrow against future income but where would priorities lie? Under PL rules, before the first PL game at Home Park the club will have to install perminant TV gantries with perminant cabeling and with the main gantry on one side of the pitch stretching a minimum of from each 18 yard line. Of course the plan will be to survive that first year so money will be needed for the transfer and playing budgets. Then when they do survive, PL rules say that undersoil heating must be in place from that second season.

There may be plenty of money coming in but I promise you, there will be lots of things requiring finance ahead of increasing capacity.