Source: FOOTYMAD
What are Wednesday waiting for?
What happened to the much vaunted head start in the transfer market? With more than three weeks having passed since the end of the 2009/10 season although there has been plenty of news to talk about off the field very little has taken place in terms of shaping the team for the forthcoming season as far as Sheffield Wednesday are concerned. Throughout the course of the last campaign Wednesday fans were encouraged to buy their season tickets early as this would help to determine the budget for the season ahead and allow the club to get a head start on other teams in terms of attracting new players. Relegation may have affected this process a little but realistically there had been a good chance that the Owls would be playing League One football in 2010/11 for some time and contingency plans should have been in place for this. Many teams have already made moves by getting players to commit to new contracts or sign agreements to take place up on their impending release from their current club but the Owls have hardly had any firm links to players at this stage never mind made new acquisitions. Chairman Lee Strafford officially left the club with the interim incumbent Howard Wilkinson stating that budget plans have not yet formally been agreed with 1st team manager Alan Irvine. With the season ticket deadline having finally passed after a few alterations on April 9th surely the club should have been in a position to assess and make effective forecasts on how much they have available by now? Relegation will obviously have had an adverse effect on a number of revenue streams such as broadcast income and sponsorship/advertising but as stated, this should have been taken into consideration some time ago. Some of this will also have been offset against some of the players that were released at the end of the season, who included some of the better paid players at the club. With a number of issues seemingly up in the air at the club at the moment Owls fans will be hoping for some positive news on the playing side sooner rather than later otherwise the club should surely consider the fact that the early season ticket sales introduction was made at a bad time and has clearly not worked. In 2003/04 Wednesday achieved increased attendances on the back of relegation to the 3rd tier but with season ticket sales down by thousands on last season and with the significant price deadline having already passed it is difficult to see how an apparently forward thinking club that has forged important links with its fans and the community of late can achieve anywhere close to the 22,000+ average that they did back then. Developments have been made in terms of much improved merchandising and catering but the price structure and approach for selling season tickets means that the potential support, as evidenced in the final few home games of last season, is not being fully utilised and the club are therefore not making anything like the best use of the improvements they have made at Hillsborough.
