Hello all
As with most big questions there aren't really easy answers, and in this instance there is a difficult model of supply and demand to work on. For example, if your ideal situation is for ticket prices for both adults and children to be significantly less, AND for dads to take their lads or similar to every game, then just as many people as now WON'T be able to go to games.
How does that work? Well, clearly if tickets were £15 and £10 for kids, or season tickets were £300, they would sell like even hotter cakes. There would be a stampede to buy either on a first-come basis or on some other system, let's say "proximity by birth / matches attended" etc. Without doubt all games would be sold out (as they currently mostly are) and no-one outside the system would be able to get to any matches.
You might argue that even so, those new fans would be true working class supporters with more 'right' to a ticket than some out-of-towner. So a passionate fan whose family left the city when he/she was 5 should be considered as less worthy of a ticket; a teacher, dentist or other "middle-class" professional has to take their place at the back of the queue; and so on; and if you are a moderately wealthy person who is inspired by Liverpool's history, players and people and desperate to experience it for the first time, just forget it.
But actually, all those rules more or less apply NOW. It's already well on impossible for everyone who wants to go to get a ticket. It's almost impossible for everyone who is willing to pay current face value. It's pretty difficult even if you are willing to pay more.
And the real truth is - the people who go ARE nearly all fans. Liverpool does not have 35,000 prawn sandwich eaters outside of the Kop. All the fans I have been with at any match home and away have been genuine, passionate, vocal and loyal, whether they come from Norway, North London or L4. When the spit rains down on us it lands on librarians and dockers alike (and me).
So no matter what happens, genuine deserving and committed fans are missing out and will continue to do so. A change in pricing or admission policy won't stop that happening. You just replace one form of exclusion/preferential treatment for another. Maybe, if you see this as part of a greater political struggle, it's a "moral rebalancing" of the pendulum, but I don't know about that. There are holes in all the arguments from all sides.
So what's the answer? Short-term, I can't see anything. A bigger stadium might be a starting point .. but it would have to be much, much bigger. And I don't want to end up like Arsenal. Part of me wants us to remain defiant and awkward, innovative and unreconstructed, to be the Yosser Hughes in a room full of Will Selfs or Alan Sugars. But we know what happened to him as well ...
YNWA