THE CONCRETE ROUNDABOUT (TCR)

What about heavily investing into the women's team, and including their matches in the regular season ticket, to have one combined ticket for the men's and women's teams? The womens matches would have to be at Stadium MK but clubs have groundshared before and the pitch has stood up to it.

Wouldn't affect me as I live about 45 minutes away and wouldn't make the trip for a womens game, but if I lived in MK I would accept a small increase in the price of a ST to go along.

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Short answer: no, the team doesn’t have enough money as it is and there isn’t enough revenue/fans for it to be worthwhile anyway. We barely get 5000 for the mens team.

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Most pessimistic poster - 2020

I would not accept it. I don't want to watch the women's team so why should I pay for it ?

So you want to increase everybody's season ticket payments so that they can access games that they're not interested in watching, and that you won't even be attending yourself?

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"I sometimes buy the Big Issue out of social embarrassment. I don't buy a fucking bank!"

Yesterday's game was free entry.

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When you make your music, do you think about the man in the street? No, I've met the man in the street. He's a Ladybit.

Watched the highlights and I can only say that was the most embarrassing display of goalkeeping in the entire history of football. Unbelievable !

Well, I suppose so. Or maybe make it opt out, a la the academy supporters draw.

If anyone is more familiar with the womens team than me feel free to correct me, but let's run some numbers.

A season ticket for the womens team is £35. Pulling numbers out of my arse, lets say that the womens team has 200 season ticket holders, (I suspect it has less but I could be wrong) for a ticket revenue of £7000 from ST holders. Let's round this up to 15k yearly ticket revenue, including walk ups (again, I feel I may be being very generous here, but happy to be proved wrong).

Lets add the women's team matches as an 'opt out' for the regular season ticket, and charge an additional £15, on average. Let's also assume that half of our regular season ticket holders decide to opt out, so we'll have roughly 3000 season ticket holders who hold a combined mens and womens ticket. We are now looking at a revenue of £45,000 being generated by the womens team, triple what was being generated before. If matches prove too costly to put on at Stadium MK, then we can always partner with a local non league team, and offer to pay rent, or work with them to make improvements to their ground. Honestly the more I think about it the more resonable it sounds. And you're telling me that watching the womens team win 17-0 wouldn't be a refreshing change of pace?

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22/23 APL Prediction League champion
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The maths is fine, but I'm not sure what this achieves.

First of all, what does that £45k get used for? In the grand scheme of things, that isn't a massive amount of money.

Secondly, the optics of it would look absolutely terrible right now. You currently have a fanbase that is already extremely pissed off that they left their ST money with the club during COVID and have been given a much poorer on-field and off-field experience as a result. They're also extremely pissed off that PW stated that the club was solely focusing on and investing in on-field performance, resulting in a team that is currently 19 places lower than it finished last season. Asking them at this point to cough up even more money for something they don't want is just going to piss people off even more.

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"I sometimes buy the Big Issue out of social embarrassment. I don't buy a fucking bank!"

Well it would probably go further for the womens team. The objectives would be to raise awareness and interest in the womens team, and have it become more sustainable, not for it to provide a financial windfall for the club as a whole. As for fans being annoyed I honestly can't see it, yes, many fans are frustrated at the minute, myself included, but this is a seperate thing IMO, personally, I wouldn't feel like the club was trying to extort me at all, for the sake of £15. I mean again, comparing it to the academy supporters draw, that's basically a straight up donation to the club, and I'm sure we still pay it in our thousands. It's not like we even have a good academy anymore!

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22/23 APL Prediction League champion
22/23 APL Hall of Fame champion
22/23 How crap? Winner's league 3rd place

Will it, though?

People know that the women's team exists, there's plenty of info about it on the club's official channels, and the financial barrier to watching them is virtually non-existent (it's half the price of going to the cinema). And how many people actually attend? A few hundred?

I find it hard to believe that anyone who genuinely wants to watch MK Dons Women isn't going already. Forcing everyone to pay extra, and giving the women's team an extra £45k or whatever, isn't going to make a blind bit of difference IMO.

This probably makes me sound like I have a massive downer on women's football and I don't. It sounds like our women's team are doing well, and that's great. But there does seem to be a huge gap in perception between how big people (especially the media) think women's football can get and how many people are actually interested. England are getting great crowds but WSL attendances are still only at National League level - Chelsea still struggle to fill Kingsmeadow.

If you want to get MK Dons Women in front of a (slightly) larger audience, my suggestion would be to play one of their games at midday on the next Family Fun Day.

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"I sometimes buy the Big Issue out of social embarrassment. I don't buy a fucking bank!"