I miss Life On Mars. It was a great TV series. If you didn’t see it, it was about a police officer who had a car accident and woke up in 1973. Like most time-shift drama, a lot of it was about differences – the attitudes and language of the 1970s as seen through the eyes of someone from the supposedly more progressive 21st century.
So imagine my excitement when I woke up on Friday 17th March and found that my own football club, Ipswich Town, were reviving the show’s concept! In announcing the season ticket pricing structure for 2017/18, managing director Ian Milne, quoted on TWTD, said that part of the strategy was designed to get younger fans to bring other family members along. Specifically what he said was:
“I think we’ve got a good cost strategy to go to the university and the schools to say, let’s try and get dad along as well”
See? We’ve had a collective car accident and woken up in 1973. Ian Milne is Gene Hunt and the rest of us are Sam Tyler. Don’t be coming to Portman Road with your fancy ideas about equality and inclusion. This is a world where you go to football with your dad. Never mind that my partner has started coming to games with her daughter this season, and was thinking of getting 2017/18 season tickets for them both. That’s clearly not the target demographic. Find a dad and bring him along. Never mind if you don’t have a dad, or if you’re a single mum/primary carer, or if – and at this point Ian Milne, if he’s reading, should probably look away for fear of having his well-paid solicitor’s mind blown – you’re female and just enjoy watching football. This is 1973 and it’s about targeting the dads. So the rest of you can just stick to your knitting patterns and shoe shops, or whatever it is that the managing director of a prominent community-based organisation thinks you should be doing on a Saturday afternoon.
If you think I’m exaggerating in suggesting that the club has positioned itself as the moral arbiter of thought, feeling, and attitude for its supporters, look no further than Milne’s interview with the Ipswich Star:
“Q: You’ll be aware that there are many sitting on the fence still regarding whether to renew or not. The rise is not a huge amount of money – pence per game in most cases – but the fact there is any sort of rise could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for many. Is the club not risking a lot for a fairly small reward?
A: I understand. I would reiterate there is a need to fall in line with the owner’s strategy which he set out in January.”
So there you have it, people. FALL IN LINE. An actual human being in an actual grown-up proper job, in a senior management position at a high-profile football club, actually used those actual words in an actual interview with the local paper. Fall. In. Line. See what I mean? We’re Sam Tyler, we’ve been in a car accident, and it’s 1973. If you don’t like how things are in this world, tough. That’s the world you’re in now – get used to it.
The last edition of Turnstile Blues had a front cover comparing Marcus Evans to Chairman Mao. We thought it was relevant and funny to depict the club’s owner as the sort of person who would expect the general population to accept his word as gospel purely because it was him who’d said it. When you read a phrase like “fall in line with the owner’s strategy” coming from the mouth of his leading apparatchik, it starts to seem a lot less like an exaggeration.
Much virtual ink has already been spilled on the subject of the season ticket prices, including on these pages, so I won’t go on about it at length. The club’s cack-handed “strategy” – which includes such gems as offering a 5% rebate if season ticket sales reach a certain level, meaning that if people complain about the price rises, the club can blame supporters for not buying the tickets! – has clearly backfired, if indeed it was ever the intention to re-engage those disillusioned punters who have been deserting Portman Road over the last few seasons.
The discounted under-23 season ticket represents an attempt to reach out to a younger generation of supporters, but this aim is undermined by price rises which discourage parents from bringing younger children – Stephen Skeet has already written about that on this site – and any long-term objective is therefore defeated. And that’s not to mention the threshold for older people’s discounts being raised from 60 to 65. Before the recent Wolves match, I was on a bus into town and saw a young boy on his way to the game with his grandfather – a sight which made me smile because it reminded me of my own childhood. If that grandfather was in his early 60s, which he looked like he was, then my calculations suggest that their total season ticket bill for 2017/18 will be 50% higher than it was for the current season. When the renewal packs arrive, how do you think their conversation is going to go?
I have written so many times, on these pages and in the print fanzine, about the club’s repeated failure to attract young supporters to Portman Road, and what a catastrophic long-term strategy this represents, that I’m genuinely bored of doing it, and the fact that I can now write about an older generation being disenfranchised as well, doesn’t make it any less repetitive. No wonder Sam Tyler kept getting deja-vu. Whether or not ITFC are trying to take us back to 1973, the more pertinent resemblance to Life On Mars is that the Evans regime looks more and more like one long car accident.
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