No problem with tickets being around the £20 level to get ££ from away fans,.
If you drop ticket prices to 20 per game it works out at 23 per month for a season ticket on direct debit. If you can afford to go one game a month you can afford a season ticket for 3 quid more. If someone can't afford put aside less than an hours minimum wage a week to afford a season ticket they have serious issues and absolutely shouldn't be wortying about football.
If you drop tickets to 20 quid that means season ticket holders savings would be about half what it is now. That would reduce the insentive for people to committ to a season tickets. Would that not reduce season ticket sales?
What about playing big games say Villa or Preston or Bolton on a Saturday vs less glamerous ones like Brentford or Hull on a Tuesday night? If CAT A pay on the day is 20, then you are going to have to reduce prices for less attractive fixtures? Wouldnt that likely see a drop in attendance for those games if pepple can pick and choose better games for the same price?
So say you reduce season ticket sales but manage to have a increase pay on the day what happens if season gets off to a bad start and those extra pay on the day fans dont come back if we are not doing well or even if the weather is really bad on some games in winter - the folks deciding on the day would be less inclined to brave the elements to spend money. You end up losing lots of money and numbers by not getting the commitment to the season ticket.
And to do that you've already potentially cut near a third in away ticket revenue.
So expanding on Chets point - compare a CAT A game with current 30 quid price with sold out away support then say we have about 3k pay on the day Latics on top of season tickets. Then compared that to same scenario but 20 quid pay on day - we'd need 3.5k additional Wigan fans to turn up to break even just to balance out the loss in revenue on cheaper tickets. Plus that is assuming that season ticket sales didn't change which probably wouldnt be the case. When you consider we hosted City for 15 quid in a big cup game and we only added about 5-6k to our attendance how realistic is it for us to get over 3.5k extra for a Championship level league game charging 20 quid?
I'm all for reducing prices if it creates sufficient demand to make up or increase the NET revenue. But the numbers just don't look like they add up to do that. We just don't have enough demand rather than the demand is high but all priced out. The season ticket value is so good even if you were only charging 20 per game there's no reason to not have one financially. The club is bending over backwards to make season tickets so cheap and the rest of the prices are just to help bring in the revenue and insentivise people to opt to commit to a season ticket.