"No other club could do this": Dons CEO on 20,000 free ticket giveaway
‘Community Day’ is set to attract more than 20,000 to Stadium MK this Saturday
Allowing nearly 20,000 people to watch football for free at Stadium MK this weekend had one CEO mind-blown at the proposition.
With a little under 1,300 tickets left available in the lower bowl at MK1 for Saturday’s game between MK Dons and Harrogate Town, the attendance will comfortably be the club’s biggest for many years.
Giving away all the tickets for the game entirely for free comes at a cost for the club, but chief executive Neil Hart said rolling the dice on the initiative is a gamble worth taking.
“I can’t think of any other club other than us who could do this,” he said. “I could not imagine doing this at my former clubs, there would be no need to, but here there is. We have to do something. It’s a litmus test for us.
“We saw a club in Germany do something similar, Fortuna Dusseldorf, who also have a big stadium and are nowhere near filling it.
“We’re a unique club with a unique opportunity. If you’re a Walsall, Grimsby or a Bolton, you don’t have this problem. Harrogate’s CEO was shocked we were giving them away for free.
“Here, I believe we have to think about things differently. If we do something differently, take some risks, maybe we get a better outcome in terms of how we engage with the city, how we get more people to watch football here. It might be interesting to see how it pans out financially for us.”
With the popularity of the match soaring as a result of the initiative, Hart has not ruled out making it a regular occurrence.
“It depends how it goes,” he continued. “We need to assess the data afterwards, but I would like to make it a permanent fixture. We’re not a team with hundreds of years of history so we have to think differently, we can’t just rely on the fanbase that is always there, we have to build it. We’ve got fans who follow us through thick and thin, but it’s about building on that.
“You go to Walsall or Cambridge and see less than 10,000 in there, but the grounds are buoyant, loud, you feel it. You put that in Stadium MK and it’s a library because of the size of the place and it looks bad on the broadcast.
“If people can come and see a good match, see us win, enjoy the things we have going on around the ground and maybe we can hook a few more in.”