There are a few clubs in the lower leagues offering discounts to those out of work, often parallel with OAP or junior prices, but it's more of a gesture than a solution. If you're out of work, chances are you can't afford to spend £10-15 on a ticket any more than you can afford £20-25. As far as the £10 per ticket idea goes, I don't think it'd mean a rise in income: assuming we have 8,000 season ticket holders who all paid £300 (so not counting free JSB season tickets, early-purchase discounts, and crudely aggregating), that's worth £2.4m to the club, or the equivalent of just under £105,000 per game; taking this number into account, we can assume a further 6,000 tickets will be sold on average for each game at an average price of £20, equalling £120,000, and totalling £225,000 per matchday when taking into account season ticket values. To discount tickets to a flat rate of £10 (not taking into account any of the other offers on tickets the club is running, like the membership schemes and the 12 for 10, etc.), we would obviously need to bring in double the number we currently are - around 12,000 ticket-buying fans per game, and thus raising the average attendance to 20,000, in order to reach the figures we're currently bringing in. Ultimately, it's not sound logic to expect that to be the case. Not only that, but season ticket holders would then be disadvantaged by paying an average of £13 per game as opposed to the £10 proposed for everyone else.
NB: If we assume that lowering ticket prices would mean an additional 2,000 attend (optimistic, perhaps, but possible), then we'd be pulling in £80,000 per matchday on tickets (season tickets being a lump sum before the start of the season in most cases) as opposed to the £120,000 we are currently, and our losses per month would increase by the equivalent of losing one home fixture per month (meaning monthly losses of £620,000 as opposed to the £500,000 we're losing at present), assuming three homes games per calender month. I don't think it's our ticket prices are particularly problematic. Exeter City, for example, have more expensive tickets on offer than we do, and their average price is slightly higher, and they're a mid-table League One side at best - it wasn't even long ago that they were non-league. We showed last season that when the team is playing well, the fans will come out and pay the prices - 25,000 for Leeds, for example (although 6,200 were away fans, granted). Football fans feel entitled to results, as though the price they pay for their ticket means it is owed to them; it's a sad reality that it isn't the case. When the results are good, we can expect larger gates, but until then (and as much as I'd love to pay £10 a ticket) I think the club is actually doing a pretty good job of pricing tickets competitively and finding initiatives that make us more attractive to floating fans. We just have to learn to accept that we're a small club with a small fan-base. Coventry isn't a big city, and there are 92 other professional teams in England alone that Coventrians can choose to follow if they like what they have to offer, and it's frequently the case that they do. Most of our 18-21 year-olds with disposable income move away from the city for university, and those who don't have a propensity to struggle to find employment; the previous generation are by and large disillusioned with the club since relegation, and have families to spend their money on instead of a Saturday of frustration; the one demographic that we do always seem to get solid support from is the OAP bracket, many of whom bring young children, and this is pivotal to the future of the club. Encouraging families is always important, and securing that next generation of match-goers can prove the difference between administration and robust attendances ten years down the line if managed properly.