Whilst 18,000 season tickets seems an admirable number, you have to balance this against the "fact" that 15,000 of them will have been given away to students and schools. Of the 3,000 left 90% will have been sold at concessionary prices. My pig mate told me so it must be true. He looked like he was sucking a lemon whilst he was telling me this by the way.
Let's assume we sell 19K season tickets and Wedmesday sell 21K.
Looking at that stat makes it look like SW will obviously have bigger crowds
BUT statistics are not always that straight forward.
SW have a very agreesssive marketing strategy to FORCE their fans to buy season tickets.
Let's use their marketing tactics, apply it to Sheff Utd to take it to further extremes.
If SU said that match days pricing was £70 a ticket next season but season tickets are £300
Which can be paid in 10 monthly intallments of £30 a month.
In the above example I've no doubt we'd sell close to 25K season tickets.
But historically our ticket prices are always reasonable and 1000's also buy membership cards to gain a discount. So at BL buying a season ticket only saves to convenience of having the same seat, there's usually no great financial incentive to buy a season ticket, so in the circumstamces 18K is impressive.
Where as the 21K at SW is an artificially inflated stat. The marketing tactics used by Chansiri are a form of blackmail but the deluded lot still think he's a great Chairman.
It's ironic that they have a foreign Chairman who admits to knowing nothing about football, he's overspending/ wasting money putting them into debt at dangerous levels, hes an egomaniac putting his personal name on the shirts and on the stadium seating, he rarely communicates with the fans, no consideration of tradition, dumping the striped shirts for plain blue Ipswich colours and the big one, he's done what the unwanted Ken Bates said he'd do by putting up match day prices to rip off levels forcing any half interested fan to buy a season ticket.
Mark by words, more failure to gain promotion with rumblings of admin and Wednesday fans will be wanting all the sympathy saying they could be another Portsmouth. So why are they not complaing now?