What price a season ticket?
Fraser Pettigrew looks at the problems sometimes faced in backing the club

Disillusion, disinterest, protest, poverty. The reasons for the slow take up of this years season tickets are mixed, but Richard Pitt's experience in trying to buy his season ticket (Hibs.net on Thursday) made me realise that Hibs, and other football clubs, seem incapable of making it as easy as possible for fans to commit to regular attendance throughout the season.

Richard, just to remind you, wanted to pay for his ticket in instalments by standing order, but had to fight to get the club to re-open their earlier offer of this method. He is not alone in feeling that Hibs sales offering is poor judging by some other tales on internet message boards. There are plenty of fans who simply haven't got £300 to fork out in a lump at this time of year. Maybe they're just about to blow their hard earned on the annual escape with spouse and kids. Maybe they just can't afford that much in one month, ever. If they're buying tickets for a couple of youngsters too its easy to see why it can all be too much. Not everyone has a magical platinum credit card these days.

Hibs deserve credit for the "early bird" discounts offered in this year's deal, and there was a pay-in-instalments option available. But why did it have to stop? Why can't you pay over three or four months by direct debit for the cost of a slightly smaller discount whether you're an early bird or not? And why aren't there a variety of other ways for fans to buy tickets in advance at a discount? For many fans it's not the overall cost that's the problem, but merely the need to stump up in one go. For most football clubs pricing is an all or nothing business. Season ticket or walk up prices, that's your lot. For other organisations trying to get customers through the door on a regular basis the approach appears to be more flexible.

Rebelling fans - could they be tempted by more imaginative offers? (sns)

Arts organisations such as the Scottish National Orchestra realised long ago that not all music lovers can afford or even want to come to every single concert. Buying the whole season brings a substantial discount, but they also package tickets in smaller 'themed' bundles - a Beethoven mini series, a Romantic series, a difficult atonal modern rubbish series - all of which offer some discount on the full price of a seat.  Why couldn't Hibs adopt a similar approach? There have been attempts, but why not sell groups of matches at a smaller discount than the full season as a matter of course? How about the 'Sticky Buns and Jam Tarts' mini-series for home games against Rangers and Hearts? Or the 'Rasta - Red, Green and Gold' series for the visits of Aberdeen, Celtic and Livingston?

Theatre tokens make a great gift for your luvvy thespian friends, but show them you really care with Hibby tokens, exchangeable for tickets to the game of your choice? Better still, treat yourself with a pair, or three, or ten vouchers, with a discount increasing with the number of games you buy in advance. A full season ticket is not good value for many fans because they know they're not going to be able to go to more than half the matches, but if they could buy 10 games and still get a decent discount then how many more fans would commit to more regular attendance? Why penalise loyal fans with walk-up prices just because their work commitments mean they cant make every home game?

Presumably the club would be happy to sell a discounted season ticket for every seat in the ground in advance. But at the moment they only sell 7,000 and are lucky to average another 3,000 walk up punters every week. In the end of the day it is a childishly basic economic truth that selling 3,000 tickets at full price brings in a lot less money than selling 4,000 tickets at 85% of the full price.

Would it really be impossible to attract just 1,000 extra fans on a regular basis through selling seats throughout the season in a variety of ways at different discounts? There are no technical reasons why incentives like this couldn't be implemented tomorrow, and they wouldn't cost anything either - it's just a lack of vision and common business sense.

Frankly it would make better business sense to give away the 6000 empty seats for free because at least the club would make more profit from catering and programme sales. More practically, when there are unsold seats on the day of the match why not offer free entry to Hibs Kids if accompanied by a paying adult? Young Hibees are the future of the club - let's get as many of them in as often as we can. If you introduce a bit of technology there are even more possibilities for increasing the convenience of ticket purchase. If I want to go and see a film at any Warner Village in the country I can phone up, or go online and buy a seat for the show I want to see next week. When I turn up at the cinema I walk past the queue at the box office, stick my credit or debit card in a slot in the wall, and out comes my ticket.

Now a system like this is probably not cost effective for one club to implement, but what if all the clubs in Scotland (except the Old Firm, they can GTF) got together and applied a simple economy of scale? Every club in the country could offer tickets online and by phone which fans could pick up from machines installed at the grounds. The machines could even be installed in locations away from the ground to increase the convenience of collecting your ticket. At the moment you either have to go down in person in advance to collect your ticket, queue up for hours on match day, or pay extra to have it posted to you.

Instead, you could stroll into a pub down Easter Road, have a pint and collect from a machine before heading on to the game. Seriously, why not? More convenient for the fan, less labour intensive for the clubs. Ok, technology breaks down occasionally, but the point is in widening the options and making easier for people to get their tickets in the way that suits them. If other clubs also adopted the idea of block voucher schemes it would even be possible for travelling fans to buy a sort of awayday season ticket, giving them a discount on entry if they were committed to travel to a large number of away fixtures. It might get a few more Hearts fans along to derbies at Easter Road.

Clubs will continue to argue that cutting prices will not significantly increase attendances, but to me it's unarguable that football represents poor value for money these days unless you're benefiting from a discount. Whilst many Hibs fans might be holding back through pessimism at the teams chances, or anger over Straiton or the clubs occasionally woeful public relations and customer service, there are probably many whose inertia could perhaps be overcome by some simple flexibility in the way they buy their tickets and how much they have to pay up front.

Even before the collapse in TV contracts, gate money was the number one source of income for Scottish clubs. Increasing attendances has to be Hibs number one priority. There is a saying in business that everything is negotiable - it might say £50 on the box, but it's better to sell it for £40 than not at all. It's time that Hibs, and the rest of Scotland's impoverished clubs, embraced this concept and acted on it.