Originally Posted by DuncDisorderly
They were directed to by the findings of Lord Taylor, I recall. It did give the administrators a chance to take football up-market, but then if you were around in the 1970's you might vaguely recall how the standing experience might have been good for atmosphere, but was pretty shocking otherwise...
Pricing is the answer to pricing problems. You have to ask, what price per ticket to fill the stadium, then you have to wait for habits to form. Wigan have cheap season tickets but can't fill the stadium. Charltons recent ticket promotion didn't fill the ground, on the other hand, Man Utd could probably raise their prices another 50% and still fill Old Trafford.
Social conditions have also changed. Its not Dad finishing work at the foundry at 12 on Saturday, having a few beers, watching the match for 2/6d, then home for tea on the table. Male roles especially have changed dramatically (anyone who claims 'its a mans world' has fundamentally mis-understood how it all works, imo...), and it is just more difficult to fit it all in.
The dwindling crowds are not in themselves due to standing/seating. There are lots of people out there struggling to pay the bills, never mind pay for silly football, even if it was still 2/6d...
An interesting point is that from the early 50's the late 80's the decline in football attendances more or less mirrored the long time decline in the Labour vote. I would suggest that the underlying cause of both these phenomena was the decline of manual work and the male working class solidaristic ethos that went with it.
Come the 90's both the LP and football reinvented themselves to appeal to the middle class and saw an upward trend in their appeal.
There were several reasons for the decline in crowds from their peak in the late 1940's, but the main reason was, IMHO, television.
In addition, it must be remembered that attendance was at an artificially high peak in the post war years, due to a combination of factors:
1. Many luxuries were rationed: football tickets were not.
2. People had missed the game
3. As When Saturday Comes put it: "I've just won the bloody War so you're not stopping me going to every Doncaster home match. And Barnsley too".
But your television theory doesn't account for why crowds have risen massively over the last 25 years at the same time as there has been an massive expansion in television. Isn't it because football has become bourgeois and trendy in an increasingly trendy bourgeois society?