St Johnstone chief executive Fran Smith has suggested the club could yet reconsider plans regarding Celtic supporters’ ticket allocation at McDiarmid Park for next season…
Earlier this week, it was announced that both Celtic and the Ibrox club would receive access to three stands when travelling to Perth following St Johnstone’s return to the Scottish Premiership.
The move stands in contrast to the approach adopted by several other Scottish clubs in recent years, with many opting to scale back allocations for visiting supporters from Glasgow.
Smith spoke to Saints supporters directly about the issue
The decision has sparked debate among sections of the St Johnstone support, prompting Smith to address the issue publicly.
Relegation cost St Johnstone £1.7 million
Speaking to Saints TV, Smith said: “Look, we’re never going to get everything right at the club. From the ownership, to the board, to the leadership group, we’ll make decisions that we think are in the best interests of the club as a business and financially.
“At times we have to take the social and emotional connection out of things, but yeah, we get things wrong.
“There’s anger out there with fans. I want to take a minute to let people understand the decision-making process and where we can, as a leadership group, take those thoughts and continue discussions to see if there’s any slight tweaks or amendments we can make to things.
“Relegation to the Championship cost us over £1.7 million and that will be reflected in any decision-making that we make in the future.”
St Johnstone’s CEO added: “We’ve got to make sure that the club remains sustainable. We wanted to be open and honest from the beginning that we would consider three stands for Category A – Rangers and Celtic games.
“The reason being is we tried it the other way two seasons ago and we had empty stands. We then filled the stands for the Celtic game and we won.
“We took £200,000 from that. There were 2,600 season tickets last season. There are 3,200 seats in the main stand.
“With the 2,600 and hospitality, this stand still has the capacity to make sure that every single season ticket holder, when moved from the East Stand, will have a seat in the main stand.
“There’s a way that you can make the club pivot on this and make us not do it. That’s by having more season tickets than seats available in the main stand — because when that happens, we would have to rethink our strategy around that.
“By giving Category A games extra space to fill, we could bring in an extra £500,000 a year. Any profits we make from these decisions will go straight on to player payroll.
“That’s what we’re trying to do – put a better product on the park to allow us to retain our Premiership position and start to challenge.”
Quick Tip – Add Celticshorts.com as your ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the Celtic content you value the most. It takes just a few seconds and you’ll notice the difference straight away! – Click HERE….Hail Hail!
