The K's In Point
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by tim1/8/2023 21:13Tue Aug 1 21:13:29 2023
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Next thread: WINNING STREAKS by tim9/12/2024 15:44Mon Dec 9 15:44:28 2024view thread
Home attendances
Views: 1460
It really worries me that our home attendances are so low.
The entry price is just £10 - with a number of concessionary rates - and FREE for under 18s. We're not that far outside the Borough, and the overall Matchday experience is generally reckoned to be quite good.
And yet, yesterday on the back of an eight game winning steak and playing very attractive football, we managed a crowd of just 237.
This just raises so many questions.
What is the Board doing to attract more supporters - is there anything in the way of a marketing strategy? Because if the only plan was "appoint Scott Harris and build a winning team", it's not resulting in more paying customers.
If the plan was "Hawker Centre", that's dead in the water.
If the (Ben Flatt) plan was "build better relationship with the supporters", Yioryos is ensuring that won't work.
This is existential. However good the football is, the Club is doing.
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12 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 1254
The official crowd as always was significantly lower than the announced attendance of 239. I think for most games it’s been around the 160 mark, we’re told they always add on season ticket holders but surely most would be at the game so I’m not sure why these would be added on.
The fact is, nothing is really being done by the club to address the low attendance figures, it’s not even like the club has more than 10 volunteers to help anymore as most volunteers have downed tools in protest at the way the club is being run.
I would say email the chairman with your concerns but even when we’ve tried to float ideas about upcoming fixtures to attract more supporters we’ve not received a response.
It doesn’t need to be this way, there is an alternative!
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8 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 1117
i think not spending much time / money / bandwidth makes sense IF there's a plan about a new ground.
but if there's NOT a plan of a new ground - and all signs lead to that - then our brand is the only think we have left. gotta do everything possible to get people down there. but, realistically, it's a hard sell for anyone new...
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10 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 559
We are forth in the attendance league don't think this bunch could make any improvement.
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Re: Home attendances
Views: 1037
Indeed, without a ground our only asset is goodwill (essentially just our name) which is slowly being eroded.
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1 person 
1 person
Re: Home attendances
Views: 1092
It's amusing that Farnham have signed the league's top scorer today and many of the Twitter reactions have been gifs or moans about money.
Their crowds are comfortably the best in the league. They seem to have loads of sponsors. They promote special offers on food, drink and merchandise. When they beat us last season there felt like a vibe about the place, even in crap weather and the Surrey Cup.
In every way they look like a club on the up. They look completely ready for step 3 if not step 2. They *should* have the budget to sign the best players in the league, it would be weird if they weren't.
We're the ones needing the AFCW money and the board's savings to try to make the sums add up.
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10 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 1040
Now this isn't a defence of the board but...
...a decade ago our average attendance was 317. Now our (official) average attendance is 263. Granted, this is boosted by a RPV home game and whether we can trust the figure, I don't know...
Anyway, if a decade ago you'd told me that we would leave Kingsmeadow, play in Leatherhead for a year, play at Cor-Cas for a year, play in Mitcham for two years, get relegated, and then move to RPV, I'd have expected an attendance drop of much, much more than 17%! For a start, we're playing some really small clubs who only bring about 10 fans.
While I hope more than anything for a new ground in-and-around Kingston - and obviously it's looking less likely with every passing year - even if the board do pull off a miracle, my fear is that they/we think that's job done, the crowds will come flocking back.
But again, even in the league above, playing in Kingston, we were only pulling in 317. I guess this a long-winded way of pointing out that the incompetence goes back a decade or so, in terms of putting our name out there.
Edited by MC at 14:28:14 on 3rd December 2024
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5 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 843
you are correct to point out that crowds have been low for some time.
This was indeed known about roughly a decade ago, and the board decided to act by bringing in a Marketing Director to reverse this trend.
Whatever happened to that clearly inexperienced young chap??
Paul
Southampton K
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6 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 945
That's not really what's happened ,Anderson Winwright and Fenwick were deliberately allowing the club to slide down to justify Winwrights statement that Kingsmeadow was to big for the club.,and Anderson's statement that KS future lay away from Kingsmeadow, they deliberately killed this club and Yoiurgis had been left to finish it off. I believe that God pays debts in many ways,the bastards. I would like to add that the 150000 pounds they were paid to leave the ground 7 years early, 30 pieces of silver .
Edited by Korky1 at 11:58:00 on 8th December 2024
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3 people 2 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 952
Meanwhile at Farnham...
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3 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 910
I think almost every team except for us has increased attendances in the last ten years
We were 8th in the attendance table for the Isthmian Prem ten years ago now with the same attendances we'd be in the bottom 4.
A few examples
Dulwich 667 > 2516
Hampton 312 > 830
Hornchurch 266 > 712
Wealdstone 680 > 1739
Carshalton 221 > 471
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2 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 867
Interesting that you show five London clubs there more than doubling their crowds.
Non-league has obviously boomed massively since Covid but we've missed out on that entirely. We've seen it more in medium size one club towns but these crowds show it's entirely possible in suburban London too.
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1 person
Re: Home attendances
Views: 865
Some very interesting points and contributions on this thread and it’s always an important discussion point especially if we need to take control of the club or form a breakaway in the near future.
For over 10 years myself and others were raising concerns about the then board’s lack of marketing and even fan engagement. I’ve heard numerous accounts from volunteers about how they were treated by board members (some have only just returned as fans after a 10 year absence). There were many suggestions from supporters on marketing initiatives which were dismissed by the board and also really poor treatment of sponsors including a number who had sponsored games only to be ignored by the board!
Having spoken to Ivor Heller this year, he could never understand why the club did no marketing in the Kingston area when they were at KM during AFCW’s time.
Paddy referred to it as a ‘Managed Decline’ all those years ago. Look at what is left of our club and look who is holding the keys; drawing down on the AFCW money until there is literally nothing left.
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5 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 895
This guy seems like someone the board should've tried to bring on board through the KBH group:
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music/2024/12/kingmakers-album-charts-banquet-records-pryzm
- Finds workarounds in challenging market conditions
- Has experience in getting 1000s of people through the doors each week in Kingston
- Gets modern media / engagement
- Understands local gov
Seems like a pretty useful toolbox for our circumstances.
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12 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 860
Yeh, this is stupid but what’s even more daft is not listening / engaging with a Kingstonian fan on the council. I’ll never really understand that, and I won’t really forgive these people for how they’ve killed the club’s future
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8 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 755
If I remember rightly you were engaged with.when.you were a councillor by the previous owner Jim Cochrane and a handful of KS stalwarts who all attended the meeting and you did bugger all , so think before you speak.
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2 people 3 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 739
Honestly no recollection of this. which meeting are you referring to? or do you mean when Jamie presented his petition?
I guess I should be more specific. I particular mean when I was an administration councillor, especially during the debacle of Lovelace
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3 people
Re: Home attendances
Views: 626
We attended your shop beggars banquet with relevant paperwork and then the meeting and nothing,typical councillor selective memory.
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1 person
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