Here's mine for the record...
Hi Gareth,
If you are serious about achieving a 10k average attendance in Wellington then your focus needs to be more on season ticket holders, less on the casual fans. To be honest, this season's crowd numbers battle was lost around week 2 or 3 when season ticket sales stalled around the 3.5k mark (correct me if I'm wrong). That's a good improvement on last year but still not enough. You are just never going to be able to sell 6-7k individual match tickets per game consistently throughout the season with Wellington's fickle weather, the ups and downs of team performance etc.
The important thing about season ticket holders is a) you have their money up front (so in some respects it doesn't actually matter if they attend or not) and b) their attendance is much less elastic anyway. Sure season tickets holders like attacking football and winning just like anybody else but they have made a psychological commitment to the team that goes way beyond that and feels more like, gasp, "ownership". I think your number one issue related to crowds/financial sustainability is how do you significantly increase the number of members, and that's a conversation that extends way beyond playing style.
In that context I'm sorry to say that I think the communication from Welnix over the past couple of weeks has been terrible. In particular, talk of moving games away from Wellington is a direct attack on your most precious customers - your season ticket holders - and it does absolutely nothing to help promote season ticket sales to non-members. If you don't currently read the Yellow Fever forums you should. Admittedly there is a lot of stupid in there but you will also find a high number of season ticket holders who are pissed off right now. You need to do something about it, and making well-intentioned but mis-informed statements about playing "total football" isn't it. A public discussion about how to increase season ticket sales (and a serious off-season marketing push) would be so much more productive than threatening to take more games out of town or allowing the media to create a "owners tell coach what style to play" narrative.
Gareth, I'm being blunt because I know that's how you work. Everyone absolutely loves Welnix for what you have already done and I hope you will take the above comments as the constructive criticism they are intended to be.