gingerjon

There’s not a lot come back on a search but I liked this https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNR7ed7uJ/

The Women’s FA Cup today is an odd one. They seemed to accept early it was not going to sell big. I believe they have put prices up as well so long gone are the days of whole families getting in for under £20.

I have gone for the ultra conservative option of keeping things as they are. This isn't because I think things are perfect but because I think we are so far from doing our best with what we have that any changes we make will be being done without any understanding of whether they will improve things. As I said before, I think the earlier rounds now work well and the first batch of SL entry games are something for Championship clubs to aspire to hosting. The dead rounds between then and the final - we just have to accept, for now, that these are not going to sell the Cup well. But if we stop fiddling elsewhere we can come back to these. Wembley is not a great venue but it is 'Wembley' and therefore a fitting destination for the Challenge Cup. We just (just doing some heavy lifting) need to put more into the event nature of the day and really go for it with finding smart ways to engage lapsed and new audiences away from the heartlands. I actually think that is easier done if we always know that final will be on X weekend at X ground. All of this only applies to the men's Challenge Cup. I get that the optics of moving the women away from Wembley are terrible but so is the set-up with their final as an early starting curtain raiser. Women's RL needs proper investment in standalone events so let's make the Cup final one of those. There are plenty of exciting grounds it could go to as it builds to standing on its own two feet. But what it really needs, beyond that, is more clubs taking their women's development as seriously as Wigan are now taking theirs.

Aye, that's fair.

Douglas isn't the only forum member to have an attack of the vapours at the thought of dark, Satanic London. And there will be a chunk of the RL audience who buy into it being a dangerous city that no sane person should visit. Is it enough to affect the attendance? It wouldn't surprise me if it loses us some folk - but that's part of the reason why I think we should be working smarter to get those from the local market in.

For a modern stadium, the whole TV set-up is pretty poor TBH. There is no excuse for being built in a way that guarantees such awful contrast for daytime games - and, you're right, the main angle for broadcast coverage isn't great.

I said on the match thread that I thought this. It hasn't always been the case that is has but it did sound decent on the TV (to me at least).

Yeah. Guessed.

When were you last at either?

The value of secondary deals doesn't seem to have been public for a while so the most recent number I can see dates from 2004 (different world) when the BBC were paying around £2m a season to cover the Challenge Cup. I've seen nothing to suggest that they are getting it for free so they will be paying something. Someone smarter than me could look at accounts and work out how much is there for broadcast rights and do the right deducting to make an educated guess.

Just saw this advertised

I can see both sides when it comes to the 'talking about the crowd' thing. OTOH, it's important to do so because the Challenge Cup is our FTA flagship and also one of a handful of assets we have whose profits are meant to fund the whole game. We do actually need as big an attendance as possible. But ... there are 50,000 people at the Women's FA Cup final today. A drop of 25k on the past few years (because Brighton & Man City do not have massive support for their women's teams) but all I have heard from the commentators and socials has been, "Look at this flood of people coming into Wembley" and, in the build up, stressing that Brighton will never have played in front of a crowd this large before. I don't mind talking attendances on attendance threads (obviously, which is why people who come onto this thread to moan about people talking about attendances need to just scroll by) but we are always in danger in our media and social media of latching on to negatives because "telling it like it is" means never being positive.

Somehow - and I don't have an immediate answer - we have to make the day more fun and also more relevant. We've had an RL player win a prime time BBC show. Was our Gladiator there yesterday? Has she been used at all in any marketing? None that I've seen. Surely, some kind of mini gladiators is an obvious thing to do. And, yes, this does mean losing it as a double header. I think at this point we have to accept two things: one, the women's game needs standalone strong events. This is not that. Second, locking out any possibility of the day being an event because we've given three hours over to a curtain raiser is hindering the ability to make the day more than just a match.

I've put this up before, but here's a 1994 short BBC film about trying to watch the 1990 semi final for people who weren't in front of a domestic English TV set

The current deal ends next year.