[St Charles Owl]

Blimey SCO they seem quite a lot !!!

They are high, one of the highest in the division as you will find when you come to S6 next season, I think we charged Villa fans over 40 pounds when they came to Hillsborough.  Unfortunately ticket sales are by far the largest chunk of our revenue so they have to be high to keep us within FFP without the tv money that the PL gets.  You will find similar situations at other Championship clubs who are trying to compete with ex-PL teams on parachute payments.  We sold 23k STs this season at similar prices and apparently are running at about that level again next season.

Where as I suppose with our parachute payments we can keep ours low ?

Yes, I believe our ticket revenue in our most recent accounts was about 17m against a total turnover of 23.4m, so it accounts for 73% of our revenue.  After everything else is added in we still made a loss of nearly 21m!!!  Now our owner can afford that easily but when you add in the previous years loss of just under 10m then you can see how we are struggling to keep within the maximum losses of 39m over a three season span.  

Compare that to you next season receiving a parachute payment of about 60m from the PL (2.5 times our total revenue!!) and then add onto that the 25m+ or so you should get from ticket sales and commercial activities and you can see how the PL TV money and how it is distributed completely skews the Championship in the favor of the relegated clubs.  Also remember you will get a further 40m in year 2 and approx 20m in year three after your relegation.  Of course as we have seen this does not guarantee promotion for any team that gets relegated but it does allow you to pay more in transfer fees and players wages which restricts the players we can sign as we cannot offer those same numbers or it forces us to pay over what we are technically allowed to spend to compete for these players (see Wolves 53m tranfers this season).  This in turn has seen the tranfer fees in the Championship go up a lot over recent years and for sure the wage expectations have gone up even more.

Our chairman is a billionaire, but due to FFP he is restricted to approx 37m budget each season (24m revenue and 13m loss), still approx half of the parachute payment you will get next season, and therefore we can only compete at the top end of the division for 2-3 years tops, then we have to reboot, sell players, have a season or two in the bottom half and then try to go again for a couple of season, all the time while more teams come down with parachute payments.

Essentially "20 quid is enough" cannot apply outside the PL because the clubs simply cannot afford to keep their prices that low, whereas in the PL it should be 20 quid as the ticket revenue is only a small part of the total revenue. Here is a decent article from a few months ago about the effects the parachute payments are having, bear in mind this quotes last seasons parachute payment figures not the dramatically increased ones for this season:

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/foot...55976.html