Town chief executive Simon Clegg has admitted that the club got the pricing structure wrong for the recent pre-season friendly against Wolves. Only 5,904 supporters turned up to watch the Premier League side somewhat fortuitously beat the Blues 2-1 at Portman Road.
Clegg says that the prices - £15 for adults, £10 for concessions/students and £3 for under-16s — were set at the wrong level and he will look at similar games differently in future: "It was disappointing and with the benefit of hindsight I think we got the pricing slightly wrong there.
"But I discussed it and analysed it with [Ticket Office manager] John Ford afterwards and he said that if we’d halved the price, we wouldn’t have got double the people.
"I am trying to see if there is another way we can deal with pre-season friendlies. I don’t want to get boxed into a corner, but with the benefit of hindsight, I didn’t feel that that pricing structure wasn’t the most clever.”
The chief executive says the club aren't too unhappy with season ticket numbers, which have dropped from last year’s final figure of 14,300: "I think we’re at 13,200 at the moment. We’re not particularly happy at the drop, while recognising that it’s not as bad as it could have been and as some people had predicted.
"If form continues as the season has started we’re hopeful that more people will buy season tickets at the full price or will come back on match tickets.”
Town’s matchday pricing has come in for criticism over the last couple of years and Clegg says the club did consider a reduction, but ultimately decided against it: "We gave reducing matchday prices some consideration but decided that’s not where we should go. We do recognise that our match-to-match tickets are expensive.
"What we have done is introduce the Grade D ticket price, which rather bizarrely got picked up by that BBC survey, which also said we had the most expensive cup of coffee in the land.
"It’s very easy to do surveys like that, but you’re not comparing like-for-like. The fact that ours are 12oz cups of coffee as opposed to 9oz elsewhere never gets mentioned and the devil is in the detail.
"Again, rather bizarrely, they picked up on our most expensive ticket, which is directly opposite the directors’ box, and has almost got a waiting list for it. That block is completely sold out most of the time. Conversely, they also picked up on the new D grade ticket that we’ve not yet used.
Clegg says it's not yet been decided how often the new £15 adult ticket price will be utilised: "I can’t speculate on how many games will be at that grade at the moment, if indeed we even grade any as D.
"I have to make a decision about six-to-eight weeks before a particular game in terms of the grading of that game.”
The grade D games, which are more likely to come towards the end of the season, particularly if a campaign is dead from a competitive angle, will be in addition to the annual three matches where promotions are run. In recent years season ticket holders have been able to buy additional seats for friends and family at reduced prices.
Clegg says these games and any grade D games will give new fans a chance to get a taste of watching Town: "Certainly there’s that opportunity with the promotional matches. The D grade was put in as an option that we could exercise if we found a scenario where we wanted to do that.
"I’m not committing myself to any D grade games, I was surprised that it even got picked up, but it did as a result of the BBC survey.”
Ultimately, the chief executive says only improved performances on the field will significantly increase attendances and will lead to an upturn in all areas of the club: "I’m expecting to have a good season and that will drive more people through the gates.
"Everything in football depends on success on the pitch, whether it’s the shop, whether it’s sponsorship, whether it’s advertising, whether it’s programme sales, whether it’s conferencing and banqueting, corporate hospitality, the whole lot."