Town have confirmed that they hope to stage a second concert next summer, the day after the Barry Manilow gig on Friday 16th May. Tickets are now on sale for the veteran American’s visit to Portman Road.
Joint-MD Ian Milne told TWTD: "We’re hoping to have another one the day after the Barry Manilow concert but we’re waiting for the details.”
Town’s other MD Jonathan Symonds added: "It makes sense to have back to back concerts. We’re putting the staging in there and it won’t affect the pitch any more by putting a second night on, which is always one of our concerns. And it would be good to get another really big name at Portman Road.”
Symonds says Town are working with a promoter to stage the concerts: "We’re here to run a football club. We want to use the stadium as much as possible, but do we want to take risks on acts? Probably not.
"If we can get a guaranteed income it makes a lot of sense from our point of view. Putting on concerts is not what we do, getting a promoter in works really well.”
Milne continued: "We could have done a joint venture where we shared the risk, but, as Jonathan says, it’s something that we don’t know about and it makes sense to do a dry hire and, as they say, sweat the asset as much as we can.”
In the new world of Financial Fair Play, Symonds says Town are investigating other similar money-making projects: "There are other things that we’re looking at as well, things like comedy nights, some sort of tribute act type events, the sort of things football clubs do when they’re not playing football. We are considering any event that bring in additional income to support the football.”
Might they look at the possibility of staging a pre-season tournament in the future? "The issue we had this season was that we reseeded the pitch,” Symonds said.
"We put quite a lot of work into that and that paid off, but it meant we weren’t in a position to have anything at Portman Road in pre-season this year, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t be able to do that in the future.”