Commercial Activity

[TaunTon]

It's a difficult one for the club with inflation running at 7% and likely to go up towards 10% by the year end. Everybody will face that issue but we need to improve our ST numbers and for that we need to see some players who can raise the hopes of the fans and get them excited about the new campaign. Being served a diet of what we've seen for the past 2 seasons is hardly likely to give anyone a semi.

The concessions, kids prices and under 12s seem to be pretty fair but the price for MCT membership is just as likely to lose money as gain it. Mixed bag overall.

 

 

[helensburghton]

Is ton tv live streaming been binned for next season? If so, not worth me renewing my season ticket! Will keep up my MCT and lottery dues, but due to personal circumstances I can only attend a few games per season and the stream option was a good one for me!

[Jamie_M]

46 minutes ago, helensburghton said:

Is ton tv live streaming been binned for next season? If so, not worth me renewing my season ticket! Will keep up my MCT and lottery dues, but due to personal circumstances I can only attend a few games per season and the stream option was a good one for me!

They have no choice. Uefa rules coming back into force.

[helensburghton]

9 minutes ago, Jamie_M said:

They have no choice. Uefa rules coming back into force.

Does this include overseas fans?

[Jamie_M]

1 minute ago, helensburghton said:

Does this include overseas fans?

No, but they must have deemed it not cost effective to have it for overseas fans only.

Edited May 9, 2022 by Jamie_M

[helensburghton]

31 minutes ago, Jamie_M said:

No, but they must have deemed it not cost effective to have it for overseas fans only.

Cheers Jamie, I get that!

[vikingTON]

4 hours ago, irnbru said:

Don't like the Inverclyde's Blue and White tag line either... 

[Deego]

4 hours ago, irnbru said:

Don't like the Inverclyde's Blue and White tag line either... 

How naw?

[TRVMP]

4 hours ago, GiGi said:

MCT membership should give you a bigger discount than the early bird. There needs to be as many incentives to drive membership as possible.

Not sure the tail can wag the dog here. I understand that MCT is the club's owner and needs to have MCT membership firmly in mind. But the board of GMFC - while overlapping massively with MCT, they are not the same thing - needs to do what's right by GMFC Ltd. first and foremost, and driving MCT membership might not be that.

[dmcewan16]

At this moment in time the cost is too much for the players that we have signed. Few signed players that Greenock Juniors would knock back… still think the 12-17 price is quite high. 

[vikingTON]

50 minutes ago, TRVMP said:

Not sure the tail can wag the dog here. I understand that MCT is the club's owner and needs to have MCT membership firmly in mind. But the board of GMFC - while overlapping massively with MCT, they are not the same thing - needs to do what's right by GMFC Ltd. first and foremost, and driving MCT membership might not be that.

How would MCT membership not be clearly in the club's short, medium and long term interests? I don't think anyone is demanding that MCT members get to waltz in for nothing, but right now it is quite frankly being treated as a guilt trip transfer kitty subsidy on top of what you'd normally pay, and nothing more. 

If that doesn't change then both the club and MCT will have serious problems with retention of the scheme, never mind expanding it any further. 

[TRVMP]

1 hour ago, vikingTON said:

How would MCT membership not be clearly in the club's short, medium and long term interests? I don't think anyone is demanding that MCT members get to waltz in for nothing, but right now it is quite frankly being treated as a guilt trip transfer kitty subsidy on top of what you'd normally pay, and nothing more. 

If that doesn't change then both the club and MCT will have serious problems with retention of the scheme, never mind expanding it any further. 

Of course it is. The question is, does it override the need to make a certain amount of season ticket outcome? I assume - maybe wrongly - that someone has done the sums on this. If you knock (for example) 50 quid off the ST, you'd expect MCT members who buy season tickets - let's say 75%, to allow for expats, people who work Saturdays, people who don't want it, people who can't afford it - to all take them up on that. So they'd lose X amount. How many new members would you expect to make a minimum commitment of 240 quid - MCT's membership price, over two years - to make up for that? Do we know? Does anyone know?

I can see why caution reined here, in other words.

Now, with that said, maybe there can in the future be a move towards a membership model of some kind of which cheap tickets are a part. (Real Madrid and Barcelona are both members' clubs where members - socios - get discounted tickets, voting rights etc. Other European countries have a similar scheme to the socio one.) In that case you'd really bake in discounted tickets as part of a wider strategy. I think this is something we need to give serious consideration to, but as part of a massive package.

Agreed completely that when the two years are up then right now we are counting on inertia and a sense of duty to keep payments going, and while they'll work for a decent percentage of people, they won't work for all of them.

MCT and the club both have serious, serious thought to do about this, and ticket pricing is just the start.

[Mr.Blue]

8 hours ago, dmcewan16 said:

At this moment in time the cost is too much for the players that we have signed. Few signed players that Greenock Juniors would knock back… still think the 12-17 price is quite high. 

Eh?

[Alibi]

I bought a season ticket last year because with streaming it made sense. I also bought most of the away games too so a bit of income spread around the division there too. Absolutely no way that’s the case this year as actually getting to home games is becoming a bit of a struggle & likely I will only make it to a few games. A retrograde step frankly and fuck UEFA. At our level, is it really necessary to cut people off from their team? Do they think anyone will as a consequence pay to watch the elite teams instead?

[BishopBrennan]

10 hours ago, dmcewan16 said:

At this moment in time the cost is too much for the players that we have signed. Few signed players that Greenock Juniors would knock back… still think the 12-17 price is quite high. 

Knicker-wetting over the squad in May really is a new one. Fuck me. 

[TONofmemories]

No issue with the pricing. Everything else in life is on the up cost wise and morton will be feeling that too.

[irnbru]

29 minutes ago, TONofmemories said:

No issue with the pricing. Everything else in life is on the up cost wise and morton will be feeling that too.

Same but they need to be a bit more creative in selling them now to get that commitment.

I know a lot of people got them last year for the first time in ages because of the discount which meant the club had the cash in hand early on. I can't see that being the case this time. 

It's a difficult one for them.

[Waverley]

18 hours ago, Jamie_M said:

No, but they must have deemed it not cost effective to have it for overseas fans only.

Instead of just dumping it, they could easily have surveyed the overseas fans, to see how many would be prepared to make a commitment to the service. I, for one, would have been interested.

[Jamie_M]

20 minutes ago, Waverley said:

Instead of just dumping it, they could easily have surveyed the overseas fans, to see how many would be prepared to make a commitment to the service. I, for one, would have been interested.

If they looked at the numbers of users when the thing was running and deemed it unworkable, what extra Intel would a survey tell them?

[EanieMeany]

On 4/13/2022 at 2:36 PM, EanieMeany said:

Just have Morton stuff absolutely fuckin everywhere it can go, and fuck it, even devise some sort of grandiose "Greenock is blue and white" type slogan.  Flood the place in Morton, make it look like every cunt that lives here supports the team and eventually they will (maybe).

 

I'll take a 5% commission.

Anyway, whilst I get that this is a moot point, upwards of £300 to watch a football club for which even a top-half finish in the second tier of Scottish football is a rarity will never not seem excessively expensive, especially when it's in a stadium which, as much as I love it, doesn't even have hot water taps in the toilets. Ticket prices are what they are, but nonetheless Morton fans are paying premium pricing for a sub-par product - the club's expenditure may well be going up, but so is everybody else's and if that continues then the sheer, blind loyalty that allows that situation to persist ad nauseam might begin to falter. The demise of the streaming option and the signs of what the squad might look like are not huge selling points as it stands, so whilst surviving relegation and the arrival of Imrie have brought a bit of optimism, the club can't just sit back and expect punters to just part with their money without showing there's going to be something in return.

As for MCT, I think there really needs to be a serious bit of reflecting on what it actually is. I've had my reservations about the overall project from the off and whilst there has been some progress, I'm not convinced that it's doing the job it could or should be doing.

I was particularly struck by the Tele referring to MCT as a "fan investment group" recently. Now obviously that's what it was initially, for good or ill and it's not a new term, but seeing it described as that at this stage of the game was a wee bit jarring, not least because its probably the blunt truth. Is that really what the ownership of a club should be? I really don't think so, but it's hard to avoid the feeling sometimes that it's no more than source of funding and the conduit for a wee clique to entrench themselves in the boardroom with no accountability.

I'm not sure exactly what the perfect version would look like, but I think a socio-type model would be the most appealing, whereby there's some kind of rewards/entitlements based on contributions. 

For example, £10 a month would get you £x amount off strips, %y discount of hospitality, access to a couple of events throughout the year etc - the SSC membership is probably a good comparison for a basic package, with increasing benefits for higher contributions, edging towards the Business Club thingy. All of this as part of a revamped organisational structure that had clear aims, hierarchies, targets etc etc, and the clear understanding that MCT representatives on the board were there on behalf of members and accountable directly to them and not just there on a free-lunch ticket.