The binman chronicles
Player Valuation: £80m
You may be right but is that really the case? Off the top of my head:
A stadium that regularly has empty seats could act as a disincentive to season ticket sales with some fans deciding to be more selective on which games they attend.
Empty seats detract from atmosphere, damaging the experience of those who have attended.
The availability of cheaper seats could see some existing fans trading down, so instead of bringing in new supporters the club winds up taking less from existing matchgoers.
Finally, financing the bigger stadium could have an impact on money available for the team. Arsenal had a relatively thin few years in the Emirates as they tightened their belt. Wenger got them through that by continuing to qualify for CL football.
I get your point and if you're right and the gamble pays off then great. Most business people though would need to see sufficient evidence for future revenue before funding a lift in capacity of over 50%. It's a big gamble with the club's future finances.
I can appreciate your points but there are arguments against. Doesn't mean either is the winner, they just stand alongside to weigh up. Season tickets actually reduce the income as people get the seat at a discounted value. What season tickets do bring is guaranteed income, however our percentage is higher than many clubs who have far bigger stadiums.
Look at it this way I think we have under 7k available for walk ups, the 30 or so thousand season ticket holders have committed to go to every game, these people unless they wanted to drop going to quite a few games wouldn't want to pay 50 quid per time as a walk up. If we keep a similar amount of ST at BM then we would have roughly 15k available for walk ups. This is still very small compared to almost every decently sized club in the country.
There is no reason that a 55/58/60k would be unreasonable. Especially given the fact that it becomes so much more expensive to build as an extension than it is to do it first time around. If we had a design where basically you could fill in the corners at a later date then it would make sense to wait, but seeing this is going to be it, bar standing - which every club would then increase by a similar amount. You have to build for the future and not just now.
No one likes empty stadiums but when you have 40k in 75k then it feels empty. 50k in 55k wouldn't. Some of the better atmospheres at Goodison have been when there was a crowd of 33k and it didn't particularly look empty when that used to be the average gate. To have a good atmosphere you need young blood, if the current matchday crowd are happy to go for the next 10/20 years then you'll get ever older and presumably quieter fans. Make the next generation blues and give them opportunities to go to the game.
On the finance side of things, Arsenal basically shut up shop after they built the stadium as they weren't prepared to mortgage over a longer term. Moshiri and Usmanov both signed an open letter explaining that they could have built the stadium and still have spent in the transfer market. So we are not doing this to constrict spending, we will be getting a stadium that pays for itself + a bit more to put back in the team.