I'm quite lucky to still be close with many of the friends I grew up with from an early age. Out of all of them, I'm the only one who is an Ipswich Town fan. The closest one of them, who I was best man for when he married and vice versa, is a Liverpool fan. Like me he wasn’t born in Suffolk but moved here at an early age, however unlike me he chose to support the Reds rather than Ipswich, despite the former being 260 miles northwest of where he was living. Whilst this was in no small part due to the strong connections with his family still living in Liverpool, the modern era of Sky Sports certainly helped facilitate this decision.
Both my friend and I are part of the first “Premier League” generation, if you will. When the inaugural Premier League season began in 1992 I was the tender age of 6 years and 9 months (the months of course still being an important thing at that age!). I have very little memory of English football prior to the Premier League, and top-flight football being readily available on television both at home and in the pub has always been the norm for me. My own heritage is 300 miles southwest in Britain’s ocean city of Plymouth. However whilst my friend was able to watch Liverpool on the telly on a regular basis growing up, Plymouth Argyle did not have anywhere near the same exposure. This, and the fact that Ipswich was a top flight team during those first few seasons of the Premier League's existence in the 90s, meant that I ended up choosing the Tractor Boys as the team for me.
In the last issue of Turnstile Blues, I wrote about my introduction to the club and my early days of travelling from Felixstowe to Ipswich by train as a teenager during the 99-00 promotion season, and sitting in the lower Cobbold Stand watching that great team march towards another play-off campaign and ultimately that wonderful day at the old Wembley in May 2000. I remember clearly that it used to cost me £4 on the gate to go to those games, and that as a young person the club seemed accessible to my generation. As I grew older I was able to appreciate more that the club had a good approach to engaging with the “next generation” of fans through cheaper tickets, the U11 £10 season ticket, the Junior Blues and the mascot scheme (which even my Liverpool supporting friend took part in!).
That was then, this is now.
Friday’s announcement of the 2017-18 season ticket prices was, in the words of Mr M. Tucker, an “omnishambles”. It was also a continuation of, despite protestations to the contrary from the current regime, the decline in focus on that next generation by the club. The £10 season ticket for U11s was a stalwart of ITFC ticket prices to such an extent, that its scrapping and replacement with a £50 U12 season ticket was met with near universal shock and dismay. Stephen Skeet and Gavin Barber have already written pieces for this site on the impact of this decision on their personal situations. I won’t go over those impacts again, and that particular decision does not impact me directly, but as someone who wants to start a family soon and pass on the love for this club to their children I too find the decision appalling and lacking in any real merit. The argument made by MD Ian Milne that this was to stop people “abusing” the system to keep seats around them empty to store their bags on (!) seemed frankly ludicrous. Given the amount of preparation time the club would have had for this response, I can only assume the club have hired PR advisors in the form of Alan Partridge, Basil Fawlty and Terri Coverley.
It’s not just at that end of the pricing structure that recent decisions will affect getting younger fans into Portman Road. The club have also increased the senior concession age from 60 to 65. Approximately 800 season ticket holders are now going to be hit with a sudden hike in their prices. We live in a modern era where the traditional “nuclear family” model is no longer the norm; grandparents play a large part in the lives of their grandchildren in a lot of cases and this includes family trips to football. With a five-fold increase for the children and another substantial hike for the older generation, family groups are going to be literally priced out of the stadium.
If Portman Road becomes somewhere too expensive for families to go, we run a real risk of losing the next generation of fans to other clubs. It is sheer arrogance to assume that as we are, arguably, the most high-profile club in the region that things will all come good in the end. Colchester United, only a short trip up the A12 from Ipswich, do not charge for their U11 season tickets and allow each paying adult to bring up to four, yes FOUR, U11s for free. Our old enemy up the A140, despite recent struggles to return to the Premier League at the first attempt, have enjoyed relative success for a number of years now; despite the BS that punditry spew every time there’s a derby that Ipswich and Norwich locals never interact between games that’s not the case and given there are often family links between Suffolk and Norfolk it could be that the participants become a more attractive option if their success and our malaise continue.
We also live in an era where top-flight football is more accessible to families than ever. Not only can you sit in your front room and watch the best clubs in Europe compete, you can watch it on your computer and even on the move through smartphones and tablets, and follow results and live team news through a variety of apps. London is not all that far by train and thanks to Boris Johnson's creative use of taxpayers' money, West Ham United now has a new home that is on a direct train route from Ipswich.
Ian Milne said on Friday that the club is focussed on bringing younger fans into the stadium, yet the overall approach in this ticket pricing “strategy” seems to fly in the face of that and give no thought to a long-term plan to keep the club relevant to the young people in its catchment. I already come from a generation where the modern era has allowed people to create affinities with clubs geographically distant from them; this has been to the detriment of other clubs across the country similar to us and I really do fear that Ipswich Town could become another one of those casualties if they continue this approach.
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