Problem is, aside from it being unaffordable, it is generally difficult to get tickets (even with a membership and all the L-Postcode schemes etc), and even once you have tickets you can often be sat away from your mates. Often times you are just chasing after loose tickets from (often older) mates of mates or family who just can´t make it to the match that day for whatever reason. Meaning the pool for tickets decreases to those who know someone who knows someone....
And as the Anfield crowd gets older and older, the culture of going to the match for the younger generation, who can just as easily watch at home or in the pub, starts to fade away. I´d say we´ve probably already missed on one and possibly maybe two whole generations of match going fans in this way.
Whole things shit really. And it won´t ever change until they go back to a having a decent proportion of tickets that you can just rock up and buy on the day. But that is simply never going to happen, no matter how many times we expand the stadium. And perhaps it is already too late for that anyway
Thing is at some point there will come a time in perhaps another ten years when its a commercial imperative to get younger fans into the stadium - but by that time it will be too late for a sufficiently large culture of regular match-going to have developed amongst the younger generations, leaving the club totally reliant on getting in a large and constant enough stream of people who might go once or twice a season (Or once every few years, or once a lifetime...).
It's really depressing. I was a regular for 30 years but two things finally finished me off. The first was the increasing difficulty of getting tickets. Even when we were the best team on earth and pulling in 55,000 for big games I always got in. As the years went by, though, it became more and more difficult untill we got to where we are now.
The second issue was the cost. Whereas you'd be there every other week in the past, you'd need to save up and pick the games you wanted to try to get tickets for because regular attendance was simply too costly. As kids, teens and young adults we could get there early and have a good chance of getting in, getting to and from the ground, buying a chippy dinner and a few drinks all without breaking the bank. Now, well you need a mortgage just to do a match or two per season, if you are even lucky enough to find a ticket.
Once you're an adult with commitments, it becomes increasingly harder to justify the outlay, given all the other priorities you have. So, many thousands of Reds are excluded due to cost, availability or both.
We've definitely become victim of our own success too. Too big a fanbase and too small a stadium. We'd easily fill an 80,000 seater for big games at current prices. At sensible prices we'd fill an even bigger stadium than that too. The fans are there, but availability and sensible pricing is not. I'd say a good 95% of the hardcore, match-going Reds I used to go home and away with do not go anymore. For almost all it's due to cost and availability of tickets.
Sadly, we've missed out on at least a generation or two of new, young, fans able to attend regularly. It saddens me, it really does.
My Blue neighbour mentioned a while back about how they have far more season ticket holders than we have. He saw that as something of a bragging rite. Thing is though, they have no demand outstripping supply. Any young local kid who wants a season ticket there can get one for relative peanuts. So their youth can attend, whilst most of ours cannot.
We could sell 54,000 season tickets quite easily, but choose not to. Everton have to virtually give them away to fill the ground and to get the money in early. Our situations are chalk and cheese.
It's different for the Mancs too. From all the evidence on show they've reached their ceiling as far as attendance goes. Their crowds are often a lot lower than the reported figures according to GMP. But their stadium is big enough, whereas ours simply isn't. For their fans, so long as they can afford the prices, availability is pretty good.
One way or another, though, at some point we are going to have to find a way to get our local youth back into the ground regularly.
