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Attendance Levels


Murray7

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As I wrote above only a good team playing well will bring a larger crowd. Mate , I attended games where less than a thousand turned up for a league game even many games below the 2,000 mark. so you can imagine how that looked at Love Street when it had the old Love Street and St James end.

Get a good team playing the atmosphere will also lift. Take your mind back the night we thrashed Celtic. Take your mind back when Billy's boots scoring from the penalty spot to put Celtic out the cup. Its not the stadium that makes the atmosphere its you me and the rest of us.

There have not be many,if any,crowds of under 1000 at St Mirren home games.
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The aging of our support is becoming more and more evident and must be related to the morgue like atmosphere at the games and a boring family stand isn't going to fix that.

It's all connected JC. The location scunners some folk especially in foul weather, the lego stadium scunners some folk, the cost scunners some folk and the product on the park scunners some folk however there are potential solutions to all these mentioned within this very thread. It wouldn't do any harm to at least try some of them to see if it helped. Take the bussing of fans to / from the stadium. A bus hire for an hour or so either side of KO would be 300-400 per bus max (possibly cheaper if anyone at the club "knew someone" in the business). At current admission each bus would only need to attract 15-20 extra (obviously above ST holders) people to just break even. We have ample area for bus drop off and pick up right outside with same the same under the Piazza I can't see much downside. BOGOF and ST friends for a fiver are good initiatives but they need to be properly thought out. Atmosphere can only be improved by 2 things. More bums on seats and giving them something to sing about. It's not really rocket science.

Edited by Ayrshire Saints
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There have not be many,if any,crowds of under 1000 at St Mirren home games.

I'm going back HSS way , way back as a kid you looked at the paper for attendances one game dipped below 1,000 while most gates at the time were around 1,200 in our dark days. Maybe a older poster will remember the dates of that time.

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I'm going back HSS way , way back as a kid you looked at the paper for attendances one game dipped below 1,000 while most gates at the time were around 1,200 in our dark days. Maybe a older poster will remember the dates of that time.

HSS is old.
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I'm going back HSS way , way back as a kid you looked at the paper for attendances one game dipped below 1,000 while most gates at the time were around 1,200 in our dark days. Maybe a older poster will remember the dates of that time.

Ian I'm pretty sure there were a few sub 1,000 home attendances in 1974. The stats sites don't back that up but there are clearly some quoted attendances where the figure has been pulled out the air. The one game in particular where I know the stats are wrong is v Cowdenbeath on 23rd Nov 1974 , the figs say 1,158 but there were articles in both the Sunday papers and PDE that week stating that the attendance , around 850 , was the lowest in our history !

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Ian I'm pretty sure there were a few sub 1,000 home attendances in 1974. The stats sites don't back that up but there are clearly some quoted attendances where the figure has been pulled out the air. The one game in particular where I know the stats are wrong is v Cowdenbeath on 23rd Nov 1974 , the figs say 1,158 but there were articles in both the Sunday papers and PDE that week stating that the attendance , around 850 , was the lowest in our history !

Cheers Billy

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You put it so nicely icon12.gif It's just the common sense being shown by many on here is utterly wasted. The OP will write this up in his dissertation, like thousands of others before him, and yet still no-one within the game will pay a blind bit of notice. You know why? Cause football chairmen all over the country believe cutting prices doesn't work and they can't get their head around the fact that if their clubs stopped wasting money on failed projects they could actually develop the club within the local community and grow from there.

When I sat down with Stewart Gilmour in 2000 he talked about John Boyle at Motherwell as though Boyle had lost the plot. Discounted prices, more expensive players surely that would all end in disaster. He was right, it did. Motherwell landed up in administration. The thing is that because that was the outcome no-one looked at what happened at the matches where gate prices were cut. I know cause I took both my kids and a load of their friends to a number of discounted Motherwell v Dundee United matches where the typical crowd for those games rose from around 4,000 to over 7,000. Many St Mirren fans will also remember that Fir Park had 9,277 fans in when they cut admission prices to £5 for the relegation decider on the 12th May 2007. Instead the Motherwell project is rolled out time and time again as to why cheap admission is doomed to fail, always forever amen. Yet that's simply not true. Some of the "new" fans that turned up at Fir Park during those discounted times have stuck. I know quite a few of them. Several are now season ticket holders, many more are occasional visitors. Cast your mind back to Motherwell matches both home and away in the Premiership v St Mirren - remember the large young team making all that racket......now have a look round Greenhill Road next time you are there. Where's the large volume of youngsters in Paisley?

Instead Gilmours legacy at St Mirren is an ever dwindling number of grumpy middle aged to well past retirement age fans who've gotten more worried about reserving their seat than they are about the clubs performances on the park and if the board do make a nod at discounted prices they f**k it up completely with bizarre promotions like this Bring A Buddy nonsense. I've gone way past fatigued on the subject. There's so much that could be done, so many lessons to learn from clubs all around the country, but this is St Mirren and no-one here can see beyond being handed a self congratulatory pat in the back for ticking all the boxes Mark Wotte and his band of shysters put in place.

St. Mirren have offered discounted prices on a number of games in the past and regularly hand out free tickets to local boys clubs.

Motherwell went into admin because they signed players on high wages on the expectation that success would bring in larger crowds.

Unfortunately for them, all the other clubs in the top flight did the same thing thereby cancelling each other out. Motherwell, Hearts, Dundee, Dunfermline & Livingston all ended up in administration, Killie have now negotiated a large debt write off while Rangers went out of business completely and no longer exist.

My recollection is that, at the time, you advocated that St. Mirren should also overspend on wages to compete with these clubs.... :P

Edited by nosferatu
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St. Mirren have offered discounted prices on a number of games in the past and regularly hand out free tickets to local boys clubs.

Motherwell went into admin because they signed players on high wages on the expectation that success would bring in larger crowds.

Unfortunately for them, all the other clubs in the top flight did the same thing thereby cancelling each other out. Motherwell, Hearts, Dundee, Dunfermline & Livingston all ended up in administration, Killie have now negotiated a large debt write off while Rangers went out of business completely and no longer exist.

My recollection is that, at the time, you advocated that St. Mirren should also overspend on wages to compete with these clubs.... tongue.png

You impress me with your memory in your dementia years Nosferatu. I did indeed. In 2000-1 I called for the board to spend on strengthening the squad to respond to the resurgence of Dundee United who were spending big under Alex Smith. As it was the club were painfully slow to react only adding Stephen McPhee on transfer deadline day in March. IIRC that was one of the few seasons in the last 20 where the club recorded a profit.

At Motherwell I believed the problem was that Boyle appointed Davies and Black as his management team. For the standard and quality of player they were signing they were unbelievably negative and risk adverse in the way they played football. Davies also seemed to have a problem with nepotism where he signed and played members of his family when there seemed to be better options available for less. Had Motherwell entertained on those cut price days their initiative would have drawn in and captured even larger numbers of young fans. You can't argue with the evidence in the stands today though. Many of that Motherwell "young team" were introduced to the club during these cut price periods.

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The walk to/from Paisley Town Centre to stadium is depressing right enough.

Could we as a club to anything to improve it? Create some kind of 'St Mirren Way' from Gilmour Street to ground? Few flags, branding, posters?

Dunno, maybe no one gives enough of one.

Depends what way you go. High Street up by Coats Memorial down steps through wee tunnel an then just the last 600 yards is depressing shite

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Depends what way you go. High Street up by Coats Memorial down steps through wee tunnel an then just the last 600 yards is depressing shite

It is what happens when you get there that is the depressing shite.

Not the last 600 yards.

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Stenhousemuir 2005-06 in the Challenge Cup.

Official attendance was little more than 700.

Listed in programmes from that season as 1723 having been inaccurately reported as 723 by newspapers. I was at that game and there was no way there was only 723 in attendance.

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Listed in programmes from that season as 1723 having been inaccurately reported as 723 by newspapers. I was at that game and there was no way there was only 723 in attendance.

I was also at that game and there was no way 1723 were in attendance

I was in the main stand and, looking out, there was no one behind the Love St end and only a smattering of fans in the North Bank.

Somewhere between 723 and 1723 would likely be the reality and it was certainly the lowest crowd I ever witnessed in all my time as a supporter (1976-)

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