Brentford ‘Pay What You Can’ offer

Brentford are asking supporters to pay whatever they want to watch them play Stevenage on Saturday. There is a minimum entry fee of £1 for all ages in any seat in the home areas.

The Bees under Uwe Rosler have been on a sparkling run of form that has seen them move into a League One automatic promotion place after beating Sheffield United, Swindon, MK Dons and Notts County in recent weeks and now in these tough financial times at a very expensive time of year, the West Londoners should be congratulated on proposing this clever marketing idea.

It got me thinking how much I would actually pay if Charlton ran the same ‘Pay What You Can’ scheme. I think once I went to a restaurant for a dinner where the offer was that at the end of the meal you paid what you thought the dinner was worth. I remember it being kind of tricky as I didn’t have any real parameters to what was acceptable and I actually paid pretty much what it would’ve have roughly cost anyway, probably with a larger tip than normal.

Perhaps Brentford will get a similar response with normal attendees paying the regular matchday price of £21 for adults and a fiver for juniors, although the Bees do run some very good family deals for home games. For any ticket offer over £5 the club will donate 50% of the excess, excluding VAT, to the charity Sport Relief, which I’d imagine will encourage some supporters to pay more than a quid.

So what would you do? Unlike the theatre or a restaurant, it’s the utter unknown that makes football as a spectacle so intoxicating. You show up, buy your ticket, clap the players onto the pitch and then who in the hell knows what’s going to happen for the next 90 minutes? Perhaps it’ll be better if fans paid what they can at the end of a game. Or perhaps it’s not!

Anyway I really hope Brentford pull it off and also get a good result on Saturday. Maybe Paul Hayes, who has spent a lot of this season on the bench, will get on and score the winner. I’d pay to see that.

Looking at the Brentford FC website they have sold roughly 9,500 tickets already (no mention of how much individually of course), which is almost 4,000 more than their home average so far this season. Good luck to them.