2018/19 Season Memberships

it would be a lot better the other way around. Snapper said they still need a few more parties to come to the table to make that work, so I guess they're working on it for next season. Cool idea. 

being a hick from the sticks i do not know anything about this snapper you talk about..

Mehhhhhh. Let me know when my season pass can be on my phone

pffft, retina scans to identify members at the gate would be even better 

Wow! 

I read this post waaay to quickly and was envisioning the scanning of another eye which is positioned further down the body on the opposite side to your retinas.

That's cool as shark, gutted I don't live in central welly now to flash my season pass a couple of times a day, 3 on game day.

But then how do we boost stats by scanning each other in?

#metrics

We've passed the 2k mark.  Won't take long for Brisbane to overtake us.  On track to be the lowest season membership tally again.

There's something about kiwi's (or wellingtonians at least) and buying season passes. After not losing a game until the final, and playing some attractive rugby in 2015, the Hurricanes only managed just over 4600 memberships last season - and they were giving away finals tickets with these. The previous season there was less than 2000 members. Though doubling the season membership after actually playing well and making the final shows how important on the field results are, you would expect a further increase after winning the thing.

the thing I don't get is the Hurricanes get 4600 after winning the thing, yet FFA expects us to get well over 5000 members. 

Kiwis just don't buy memberships, never have and probably never will. I think the weather is a large factor, as well as culture. Australians have always belonged to a club and purchased memberships. Their weather is also a lot better, you buy a membership there and you're guaranteed that most of the time the games will be sunny. Here, not so much - you may end up not going to a lot of games due to weather (I've done this with rugby, a lot of others would do this with football). 

If the weather was such an issue you would think that stadium designs would take this into account...

Or have we - as a nation - just become that much softer?

not so much soft, but there are a lot more entertainment options. Why stand out freezing in the rain when there are many other things you could be doing?

New stadiums are likely to take it into account, if cost isn't prohibitive. Westpac stadium were looking to get a roof but it is way too expensive. The newer Forsyth Barr stadium has a roof. 

Why buy a season ticket that ties you to doing a particular thing every second weekend when you could just end up cold and miserable wishing you were doing something else. 

I think it's 90% a cultural difference. Belonging to a sports club is very common in Aussie. The NRL and AFL clubs are massive social networks effectively and I think a lot of them have decent restaurants and bars and gaming machines and things like that. In NZ the closest thing we have too that is something like Cossie clubs, but they're nowhere near as popular.

As proof of the difference compare our membership numbers vs other teams with our attendance numbers vs those same teams. Last season, CCM had about 1000 more members than us but only averaged crowds of 70 more people than us (and that's with traveling fans from the other 3 NSW teams as well). Newcastle also had the advantage of those traveling fans, had 4200 more members than us, but their crowds were only 1500 more than ours. Perth had about 2000 more members but only averaged 900 more fans per game. WSW and MV both had significantly more members than their average crowd, which would be unthinkable here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015–16_A-League

Just annoyed that the lack of foresight going into the construction of stadiums makes it very expensive to adapt them better to the weather conditions of this country.

And I would say we are a bit softer, imagine having to trek to Athletic Park and sit there totally exposed with no roof or wind barriers in a freezing, raining southerly. Now you can park much closer or easily get public transport to the stadium, walk some of the way undercover (if you go through the train station) and be fairly sheltered for the entire game. In terms of alternative entertainment options, it wasn't like the stone age - there was internet, tv, video and pc games, books, music, shows, movies etc. 

I think you're being a bit unfair there. When Atheltic Park was replaced with Westpac Stadium the capacity shrunk considerably and fans were almost all seated under a roof. At the time that was considered a huge improvement in spectator facilities.

It's easy now to look at it and say "35k was too many" but for the money being spent it's not surprising that they tried to maximise seating. And in the early days it was regularly full for rugby and cricket. Now, not so much.

Hindsight is 20/20 but I'm not sure criticism of the decision to build Westpac stacks up that well if you consider the context of the time.

No excuses for the stupid fudgeing yellow seats though. I bet if we had those multicolored ones which look like they are full from a distance we would get a lot less shark about our attendances.

It took 15 years and a World Cup quarterfinal for a cricket game at the Stadium to be full for the first time. 

There's no way the stadium should have been built with a smaller capacity though, given rugby's populatiy in the early 90's. Can make an argument that cricket should have been left to the basin and Westpac be built rectangular, but it would have still had to be more than 30k capacity.

Rectangular with rounded corners Patrick and it would be perfect. The could have crescent mooed a stand at the basin with two tiers of proper seating and remove that crappy roof.

The simple fact is as Smithy has said, the stadium would not have been built had it not been an all purpose stadium.

In hindsight probably not the right way to go but 20 / 20 vision and hindsight and all that stuff

My season pass turned up today. 

I hope to be ringing Brenda on Tuesday to sign up.

Nice surprise with season pass being in the mail.  Bring on the games.

Season pass has arrived in CHCH! Much excitement.

2 season tickets have arrived in Palmy today. Seems dropping the club membership has caused a shift in our seats tho, guess im ringing Brenda on Monday.

I got my renewed season ticket yesterday but there's no mention of a members pack. No scarf or fridge magnet this year??

perhaps Steve they could launch a special Auckland scarf? Since they are si keen to play up there.

I had a wee moan on Twitter and got this in reply:

So same as previous years.

Must have been an overisight for the letter

Ah balls - I threw my letter away as it didn't mention anything on there about needing it to redeem my pack. I think they're going to have to send out new letters, or hopefully showing my pass will be enough!

I would think that in those circumstances your actual pass may do the trick.