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The St. Mirren FC 2023/24 thread


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4 minutes ago, andrewh said:

As optimistic as that? Wow! Having said that, if the game was in Perth I couldn’t answer you if you asked me the same question. I’d hope we can all sort something soon.

Nah, to be fair to you i was being daft there but i can't see you and your son getting the nod to attend and taking space(s) over our own fans. Hopefully i'm wrong and you both get to go though.

Edited by Spam_Valley
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Just now, andrewh said:

Fair enough on the home fans if restrictions still in place. We are not permitted any Motherwell fans on Sunday due to the council’s conditions. What a muddle. Councils free to impose conditions without reference to what others are doing will create havoc.

Yeah, from what I understand, Renfrewshire have been difficult to deal with. Saying that, there is absolutely nothing being publicly released from our PR to say what we have done to gain more fans to levels of clubs either similar level of attendance, or playing leagues below us. Its possibly conifidential conversations, though we should be opening up more to the fans, especially considering many have put money upfront last season and this season without guarantee of seeing a game in the flesh.

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5 minutes ago, Spam_Valley said:

Nah, to be fair to you i was being daft there but i can't see you and your son getting the nod to attend and taking space(s) over our own fans. Hopefully i'm wrong and you both get to go though.

 

4 minutes ago, smellthepaw said:

Yeah, from what I understand, Renfrewshire have been difficult to deal with. Saying that, there is absolutely nothing being publicly released from our PR to say what we have done to gain more fans to levels of clubs either similar level of attendance, or playing leagues below us. Its possibly conifidential conversations, though we should be opening up more to the fans, especially considering many have put money upfront last season and this season without guarantee of seeing a game in the flesh.

I’ll be raging if the council prevents me from coming to thank Scott Tanser in person for the last few years :P

Aye, we fans are the ones who hand over our money year after year, and for less this past 18 months. Time all clubs got their priorities in order.

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1 hour ago, djchapsticks said:

Which prompted a lengthy twitter debate with myself and a former board member on Saturday. (Which to be fair, several others later had their tuppence in).

The general jist was that I'd mentioned SMiSA is supposed to have a pretty deep and diverse pool of people and they'd always said that in certain circumstances, they'd draw on people within that group. I'm sure if the club put out official confirmation that they were looking for a volunteer or two to arrange a system that could book seats in as groups, the fanbase would have replied in kind.

The former board member then said 'if you think something could be done better by yourself or someone else, email the club with your suggestions' which prompted a lot of laughs given the debacle of folk waiting 3-4 weeks for a reply regarding season tickets.

Josh Magennis (a guy who has had his fair share of run-ins with the club) then weighed in and said that he'd actually gotten in touch and would have been happy to help set a seating arrangement out (even showing in diagrams how you can double seat uptake in a small area without breaking any guidelines) and funnily enough, it got completely ignored.

The person in question took a bit of umbrage at me suggesting that those running the club weren't trying hard enough to resolve this and I was assured that they were working as hard as they can. I used Motherwell as an example and got told 'they have a larger admin staff', I used Dundee as an example and got nothing back. I'm guessing they and Falkirk also outstrip us for administrative employees...

That's some Twitter thread btw.

Anyway, while I'm not going to dispute whether or not we have a larger admin staff or not I thought it was weird that the guy's claim that us having a larger turnover than St Mirren was proof of that.

Fwiw: our turnover in the accounts to May 20 was £4,948,740 (which would include the c.£1m we received from Hull for James Scott) and this is the breakdown of employees.

289415922_ScreenShot2021-08-05at13_10_03.thumb.png.75269bcd9a78829eb0b38c021cf4c61a.png

374540549_ScreenShot2021-08-05at13_12_29.thumb.png.a872ec0aeac46b505f93bac2d41d947b.png

By comparison, St Mirren's turnover for the same period was £4,068,057

1349633626_ScreenShot2021-08-05at13_13_44.thumb.png.c451162709ca3d514dd15097406d2eb9.png

I'm not arguing that we don't have more admin staff or whatever (I genuinely don't know) but I'm not sure it's as large a factor as is made out in terms of the difference in how the situation around capacities have been handled.

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14 minutes ago, capt_oats said:

 

I'm not arguing that we don't have more admin staff or whatever (I genuinely don't know) but I'm not sure it's as large a factor as is made out in terms of the difference in how the situation around capacities have been handled.

To me, it's no factor whatsoever, which is why I then brought Dundee into the conversation, who managed to get approx 4k in without using all stands. I mentioned on the thread that even suggesting that boiled down to a 'throw bodies at the problem' mentality when in reality all it would have taken was a bit of foresight and planning.

Edited by djchapsticks
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Well seen it will all be sorted by the time the OF come calling...

Just an absolutely shambles this summer from the club. The communication behind season tickets and ballots has been absolutely abysmal. I don't understand why they don't e-mail those to say they are unsuccessful in the ballot either.

I didn't mind paying my ticket last season as I understood what I was buying. The 1800 odd ticket holders not going this time have every reason to question it. It's a raw deal compared to other clubs and not as much of a sorry. 

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I've been lucky to get a ticket for Partick, and I can't make this Saturday anyway so not too concerned from a personal point of view.

I read DJs twitter thread and it is indeed a belter. Felt like the former board member was trying his best, but unfortunately there was an air of superiority about the answers and no response when sensible challenges were made.

I'm willing to give the new chairman loads of time, but this summer it looks like we have drifted from one mess to another. Perhaps a power vacuum waiting on the sale to take place? 

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19 minutes ago, Silvio said:

I've been lucky to get a ticket for Partick, and I can't make this Saturday anyway so not too concerned from a personal point of view.

I read DJs twitter thread and it is indeed a belter. Felt like the former board member was trying his best, but unfortunately there was an air of superiority about the answers and no response when sensible challenges were made.

I'm willing to give the new chairman loads of time, but this summer it looks like we have drifted from one mess to another. Perhaps a power vacuum waiting on the sale to take place? 

Thing is, I know him even from well before he was on the board and I felt a bit shite that he, as someone who is in no professional capacity associated with SMFC any longer, was the person taking the heat of questions from so many folk when it should have been current board members. John Needham certainly gets tagged in plenty of questions in social media from fans regarding the capacity issue, myself included and I've yet to see him engage with even a single one.

But the fact of the matter is that a lot of the answers given were coming from a place of someone standing up for their fellow SMiSA members, former colleagues, pals and I do understand that. I don't understand bedding in your position with answers so flimsy you could spit through them though and sort of vague accusations that we're alleging those running the club are not doing enough, especially when the Provost of Renfrewshire claimed that the club didn't even bother to ask for an extension of fans because 1039 was the maximum. 1039 was the maximum though ONLY because they didn't even try and implement groups of fans sitting together.

I did make claim that if you're in the business of being involved in the running of a football club at any level, much less the top level in the county the club plays in, you need to expect to be fielding hard questions and potentially uncomfortable ones. One of the most uncomfortable ones out there just now is 'Are you doing enough to maximise supporters getting back into the ground? Here is exhibit A, B and C to back up the claim that we don't think you are'.

Right now the answer to this is either 'We are....honest!' or more frequently, a wall of silence.

Edited by djchapsticks
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44 minutes ago, djchapsticks said:

To me, it's no factor whatsoever, which is why I then brought Dundee into the conversation, who managed to get approx 4k in without using all stands. I mentioned on the thread that even suggesting that boiled down to a 'throw bodies at the problem' mentality when in reality all it would have taken was a bit of foresight and planning.

They did manage to completely fuck up the ticket sales and ended up putting 15 randoms together in groups when they realised they had made an arse of it. 

Better than us in terms of numbers, but as inept as us regarding ticket sales.:lol:.

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Um, perhaps I'm missing something but why couldn't we have used the Airdome for training, or like I say am I well off-track?

I work every other Saturday so don't but a ST but if circumstances were not so and I'd bought one I'd be a bit miffed.

I guess it'll be awhile before I get back in...

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3 hours ago, buddie06smfc said:

I suspect the concourse issue will be the reasoning behind it - I would imagine your best bet of getting a reply would be if the BBC Scotland reporter at the game on Saturday manages to get an interview with one of the board. 

Incidentally, does anyone know if match day hospitality is allowed? They don't make use of the concourses within the main stand there so if allowed they should be able to house some supporters and it would have pub-like restrictions indoors? Or has that succumbed to the red zone as well?

We sometimes sponsor matches through my work, we got an email today offering the St Johnstone game for Hospitality.

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3 minutes ago, weebud said:

We sometimes sponsor matches through my work, we got an email today offering the St Johnstone game for Hospitality.

Think of the fun you could have, picking eight colleagues to go then drawing two of their names from a hat to see who can actually go.

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2 hours ago, Spam_Valley said:

I'm stunned that anyone is the slightest bit surprised at how badly the club have handled this. You just have to look at the array of COVID protocol's we didn't adhere to last season and come to the understanding that the club is being steered by utter amateurs. Tony Fitzpatrick included. Nice guy but hopeless at his job.

The club has been ran in a shambolic nature for as long as I can remember and it looks like our new friend Mr Needham is going to continue that trend. He needs to tread carefully because his rapport with the support could make or break him early on and he's losing at the moment.

Fitzpatrick wouldn't have got anywhere near being CEO if it wasn't for his pal Gordon Scott giving him the job.

Nice guy and all that, but he just doesn't have the ability that Brian Caldwell had in doing the job. 

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, Spam_Valley said:

I'm stunned that anyone is the slightest bit surprised at how badly the club have handled this. You just have to look at the array of COVID protocol's we didn't adhere to last season and come to the understanding that the club is being steered by utter amateurs. Tony Fitzpatrick included. Nice guy but hopeless at his job.

The club has been ran in a shambolic nature for as long as I can remember and it looks like our new friend Mr Needham is going to continue that trend. He needs to tread carefully because his rapport with the support could make or break him early on and he's losing at the moment.

I thought one of the outcomes from that was hiring a coupla guys who knew what they were doing, to prevent a repeat.

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3 minutes ago, btb said:

I thought one of the outcomes from that was hiring a coupla guys who knew what they were doing, to prevent a repeat.

We did and afaik, we haven't had any player giving a positive test since they came in.

That seem about the only thing the club hasn't fucked up this season.

 

 

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7 minutes ago, tam the bud said:

We did and afaik, we haven't had any player giving a positive test since they came in.

That seem about the only thing the club hasn't fucked up this season.

Maybe phrased my post badly but I'd also have expected these guys to know what to do to get us max possible crowds ASAP.

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Not the start we wanted as a fan owned club. Majority of the fans pissed off and the club are making it worse.

Will a SMISA meeting be called? Can imagine a lot of folk will be having thoughts about cancelling their payments.

I thought the Kibble were meant to improve this side of the 'business'.

And the old firm games bollocks, get that so far in the Clyde. Opening our arse up for that yet ST holders and pay at the gate fans are getting shafted just now leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Feel sorry for Jim and the team, they deserve 100% of our attention (ideally from the stands).

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