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Now being debated at the house of commons.

Helen Grant is a waste of time. She has not got a clue.

Wonderwall wrote:Now being debated at the house of commons.

Helen Grant is a waste of time. She has not got a clue.

Argh bollocks....now adjourned.

I hope somebody somewhere asks the question as to how it can be safe for Germans to do it & not people in the UK, & how it was safe for lower league clubs & different sports in this country to have standing, long after it was outlawed at the top level of football.

If standing at sporting events was dangerous, then the politicians who allowed it to continue, knowing it was dangerous, are guilty of a lack of care for the public & should be shamed for their actions & subject to lawsuits for any injuries concerned at the time, seeing as they knew it wasn't safe, yet chose to let it continue.

Ted Hughes wrote:I hope somebody somewhere asks the question as to how it can be safe for Germans to do it & not people in the UK, & how it was safe for lower league clubs & different sports in this country to have standing, long after it was outlawed at the top level of football.

If standing at sporting events was dangerous, then the politicians who allowed it to continue, knowing it was dangerous, are guilty of a lack of care for the public & should be shamed for their actions & subject to lawsuits for any injuries concerned at the time, seeing as they knew it wasn't safe, yet chose to let it continue.

Ted, if you would have watched the live broadcast you would be absolutely livid as I was. It was a total misrepresentation of how it should be applied. Helen Grant was going back to 2002 to quote safety and thats all she based it on. She hates standing and is not willing to entertain it.

Chinners...sort her out please

This will happen only when clubs start putting pressure on the powers that be. No politician wnats to be seen as overturning the current ruling as it will always involve bringing up ghosts from the past, even though it has been proven that it wasn't the supporters fault.

I'd love to see it back and cannot fathom how it can be considered unsafe in any way. To me that means there is something else in the background that is stopping it happening. Maybe it's the media outlets such as Sky who may lose a few of their armchair supporters or maybe it's from certain clubs who won't be able to get the extra capacity in to offset the cost but one things for sure, I'm not seeing a sea change in perspective when it comes to this issue.

PS. How many of our well paid (11% payrise soon as well) MPs were in attendance for the reading?

For clubs it will be a godsend as they will be able to fit thousands more in the ground SAFELY standing which will help lower ticket prices for average Joe.

I wonder if the powers that be have got the bollocks though?

I dont care either way. I fought on many terraces and in many streets in the late 70s and the 80s and although it was fun at the time, crowds plummeted to embarrassing levels. Now my back tells me to sit down to watch a football match so I'll stay with seating.

But there is a deeper reason that some aren't grasping. The lack of atmosphere lamented by many because of seating, is actually one reason why football has soared in attendances over the years, become family friendly, full of kids etc.

When the atmosphere changes, bit by bit, it is the Pandora's box. People are more aggressive when standing. The 'ghosts of the past' are very real. CCTV covers the ground now but if everyone is moving about what then? I wouldn't expect anyone who wasn't about in the early 80s to understand what the heck I'm talking about, but you can see where the 'regulators' are coming from.

That said I think it should get a try.

If Scotland go independent the SNP government has promised to introduce safe standing. So hopefully this will prompt our government to introduce it also.

Breks wrote:If Scotland go independent the SNP government has promised to introduce safe standing. So hopefully this will prompt our government to introduce it also.

Fuck me safe standing at Rangers and Celtic? If anything that would persuade them not to go near it!

lets all have a disco wrote:For clubs it will be a godsend as they will be able to fit thousands more in the ground SAFELY standing which will help lower ticket prices for average Joe.

I doubt ticket prices will go down. We'll still have to have all-seater for European games, and the labour costs of bolt-on seats will counteract a significant portion of the extra income from increased attendance. On the flip side, with fixed 'rail seats' the capacity increase will be minimal, and the club will have to recoup the expenses of changing the layout of the concrete steps. You'll maybe be able to fit in an extra 4-5K for league matches (cups we rarely sell out, and in Europe the seats will be locked back down), so that's 80,000 extra fans a season, at 25 quid a pop, say, totalling 2 million quid. It'll take 3-5 seasons to break even on that, even if you keep the price of the tickets for the other fans with reduced space/enforced standing the same as they are now...

Beefymcfc wrote:
PS. How many of our well paid (11% payrise soon as well) MPs were in attendance for the reading?

there were 3 in the whole place! Helen Grant (minister for sport and tourism and all round clueless idiot), John Leech (MP for Withington putting the case forward) and 1 other who was probably asleep.

Wonderwall wrote:

Beefymcfc wrote:
PS. How many of our well paid (11% payrise soon as well) MPs were in attendance for the reading?

there were 3 in the whole place! Helen Grant (minister for sport and tourism and all round clueless idiot), John Leech (MP for Withington putting the case forward) and 1 other who was probably asleep.

John Leech is a blue, so that's a good start at least.

john@staustell wrote:I dont care either way. I fought on many terraces and in many streets in the late 70s and the 80s and although it was fun at the time, crowds plummeted to embarrassing levels. Now my back tells me to sit down to watch a football match so I'll stay with seating.

But there is a deeper reason that some aren't grasping. The lack of atmosphere lamented by many because of seating, is actually one reason why football has soared in attendances over the years, become family friendly, full of kids etc.

When the atmosphere changes, bit by bit, it is the Pandora's box. People are more aggressive when standing. The 'ghosts of the past' are very real. CCTV covers the ground now but if everyone is moving about what then? I wouldn't expect anyone who wasn't about in the early 80s to understand what the heck I'm talking about, but you can see where the 'regulators' are coming from.

That said I think it should get a try.

It's not the same kind of terracing we knew though, it's just like seats without the seats, & barriers everywhere.

BlueinBosnia wrote:

lets all have a disco wrote:For clubs it will be a godsend as they will be able to fit thousands more in the ground SAFELY standing which will help lower ticket prices for average Joe.

I doubt ticket prices will go down. We'll still have to have all-seater for European games, and the labour costs of bolt-on seats will counteract a significant portion of the extra income from increased attendance. On the flip side, with fixed 'rail seats' the capacity increase will be minimal, and the club will have to recoup the expenses of changing the layout of the concrete steps. You'll maybe be able to fit in an extra 4-5K for league matches (cups we rarely sell out, and in Europe the seats will be locked back down), so that's 80,000 extra fans a season, at 25 quid a pop, say, totalling 2 million quid. It'll take 3-5 seasons to break even on that, even if you keep the price of the tickets for the other fans with reduced space/enforced standing the same as they are now...

There isnt a cat in hells chance the club would charge 50 quid for a standing ticket.

If the club get there own way one of those tiers behind the goal in the new layout will be safe standing and packed full of cheaper tickets hence the 299 season ticket price.

lets all have a disco wrote:

BlueinBosnia wrote:

lets all have a disco wrote:For clubs it will be a godsend as they will be able to fit thousands more in the ground SAFELY standing which will help lower ticket prices for average Joe.

I doubt ticket prices will go down. We'll still have to have all-seater for European games, and the labour costs of bolt-on seats will counteract a significant portion of the extra income from increased attendance. On the flip side, with fixed 'rail seats' the capacity increase will be minimal, and the club will have to recoup the expenses of changing the layout of the concrete steps. You'll maybe be able to fit in an extra 4-5K for league matches (cups we rarely sell out, and in Europe the seats will be locked back down), so that's 80,000 extra fans a season, at 25 quid a pop, say, totalling 2 million quid. It'll take 3-5 seasons to break even on that, even if you keep the price of the tickets for the other fans with reduced space/enforced standing the same as they are now...

There isnt a cat in hells chance the club would charge 50 quid for a standing ticket.

If the club get there own way one of those tiers behind the goal in the new layout will be safe standing and packed full of cheaper tickets hence the 299 season ticket price.

I'm sure that standing tickets in the plan proposed to the government will be for season ticket holders only? In that case, no, they won't charge 50 quid for a ticket, but the 25 I gave my calculations on above seems realistic. Take a bit of money off for the fact that you won't be guaranteed a European ticket if you're an ST holder in the standing section (some'll have to lose out, due to the reduced ground capacity), and you're talking about 380-420 per season ticket being the standard, I'd have thought. Remember, the less the club charge, the longer it takes them to break even on increasing the capacity.

Also, the 299 price was to reallocate people around the ground to facilitate the opening up of areas for people who wanted 3 or 4 tickets together for one-off matches. They'll probably repeat this offer every 3 or 4 seasons (or possibly every season), but won't introduce it to a standing area.

Have said before and will say it again, I just cant see it happening here after what we've been through in this country and with Hillsborough still very much in peoples minds as the families who lost loved ones finally may get some truth, justice and answers.

Personally Id support safe standing but I just don't see the powers that be pushing for it, or the clubs fully committed to it enough to force it through. A generation of fans has now grown up used to largely all seater stadia, and the gap to the days of standing is getting further and further away.

Wonderwall wrote:

Beefymcfc wrote:
PS. How many of our well paid (11% payrise soon as well) MPs were in attendance for the reading?

there were 3 in the whole place! Helen Grant (minister for sport and tourism and all round clueless idiot), John Leech (MP for Withington putting the case forward) and 1 other who was probably asleep.

That is ridiculous. These fuckers are paid to do a job yet there's no interest in the nations favourite sport.

I think we need to get John Leech into the seat, at least we'd get a shout then.

Think how many football fans there are in the country who go regularly. Add in the ones who would go but can't due to other commitments or the cost. If 50% of them said they wanted safe standing, we'd get it, as the politicians would follow the votes. However, getting football fans to agree on anything never works, as the tribalism gets in the way of realistic discussions. If a consensus looks like it's coming, it doesn't take much for an opponent to make them forget their similarities and be back to petty squables again.

As for the current MPs, I suspect Winchester and Eton didn't play a lot of soccer, so they're probably not that bothered. Besides, how many MPs will pay for a ticket these days?

I know from my time down there that adjournment debates are never well attended, they are just an opportunity for an individual MP to get a public response from a minister on a subject important to them, nothing can ever be decided at them so nobody goes that doesn't have a huge interest in the subject at hand.

The extra cost of policing (not just extra crowd numbers related but also the increased risk of trouble) , more cctv, convertible seating all combine to ensure no club with any ambition of playing Europa League or higher would be in favour. With that in mind, and also police objections on the grounds of increased public disorder risks, I'd be amazed if any government would want to revisit the status quo.