General Premier League Thread 2023-24 Mod Note in op 27/6/23 And 21/05/24

Maybe the owners are buying up a bunch of tickets? A legal way to put money into the club. They might have been doing this since the start and haven't stopped. If that's the case then it's explainable. If that's the case then maybe the ground would be full if they stopped doing it.

Eh, ever hear of season tickets?

And why would City fans be interested in going to miniscule cup games? They only care about the Premier league and Champions league I'd imagine.

Initial reports indicated that they reported 700+M in profits🤣

The point is not "bums on seats". The point is fan exposure. You can be fairly confident most club fandoms at that level break down into similar subcategories of spending/activity. Let's say 80+% will be passive action - social media engagement, or sports tv package subscription - while maybe only 2-5% having any intention to phsyically go to a match (these figures may be entirely inaccurate - but the point is the breakdowns will be similar). If your 2-5% (or whatever % of match-interested fans) is a significantly smaller number than other clubs, it's likely your 80% is too. For instance, Man Utd have double the number of twitter followers Man City do. So if they're not going to matches in the same numbers, and they're not engaging online in the same numbers... where are they?

Fan exposure - eyeballs - in all its forms is the chief driving factor towards increased sponsorships. More eyes on the team (in person or online) = more eyes on your product, for which you pay more money. Well, we can see that it appears there are not more eyes on the team and sponsors products, which is why people ask about the seemingly inflated deals.

While I'd agree that bums on seats are not as important as they once were in terms of generating revenue, they are indicative of how popular a team actually is.

Take Liverpool for example, compared to City they have had modest successes over the last 5 years yet getting tickets is very difficult.

Likewise Arse and Spurs.

Football tourism is huge business so surely one of the alleged top 10 teams in the world should have zero issues getting day trippers in for games yet in many games there are swathes of empty seats.

If you look at it objectively, none of it adds up, none of it. In 15 years they went from a bottom to mid table level team to record breaking revenue generators, all supposedly by legitimate sponsorship deals.

If anyone believes that then I've got a rather nice bag of magic beaks they will be interested in.

How many of the Real Madrid, Barcelona and United ones are bots, you are not that naive are you?

Obviously with super rich owners they are going to have bigger sponsorship.

Deals can be done with companies where they pay exorbitant sponsorship and then get price reductions from Mansour in other business so they probably end up better off.

I never said everything is above board but there are ways around breaking Premier league rules like what I've just pointed out above.

There's just so much conspiracy theory stuff being spouted here it's ridiculous.

And the fact is that success breaths growth in support and anybody that can't accept that is fooling themselves.

It's highly like that over the next decade that City will become more popular than MUFC if United don't get it together and win major trophies.

I don't know, I don't engage on any of those sites.

Even it that was the case that's a couple of years ago. City are growing all the time through winning things.

Using my 6 year old in senior infants as a barometer. There are currently approx 15 boys in his class.

5 are United "fans".

5 or 6 are Liverpool "fans".

1 is a Villa fan.

A couple are Arsenal fans.

None of them are city fans.

I'm also involved in underage coaching with my local gaa team. When we are coaching there are the guts of 100 kids there ranging from 4 to 8 years old on any given evening. Not once have I seen a city jersey, not once. There are United, Liverpool, Arse, Chelsea, Villa, Spurs, Madrid, Barca, PSG and others but again, not a single kid in a city jersey.

Of course this is just anecdotal but it's the kids that drive jersey and merch sales in the main and from what I've seen, city aren't even a drop in the ocean, despite multiple trophy wins and Sky driven saturation of city.

You see you live in Ireland where it's a tribal thing and parents tell kids who to support. This isn't the case in Asia or the USA or any other part of the world.

It's a global sport now, what happens in Ireland and to a lesser extent England isn't really that important.