Sam Earle (AFC Wimbledon) on Advancing Ticketing, Season Ticket No-Shows, and the Football Governance Bill

What’s life like day-to-day in the English Football League, how can we tackle season ticket no-shows, and what implications does the Football Governance Bill have for ticketing? These are just a few of the queries we're exploring in this TicketingPodcast.com episode with Sam Earle, Events Operations Manager at AFC Wimbledon.

Formerly the Events and Ticketing Manager at Sutton United FC, Sam's outstanding work and his openness in sharing insights made AFC Wimbledon take notice, prompting his move from Gander Green Lane to the Cherry Red Records Stadium (affectionately known as Plough Lane to many). His willingness to share has also welcomed him into the virtual studio of TicketingPodcast.com as our 22nd guest.

Discover how targeted communications and data-driven approaches can increase match day attendance, and why avoiding the discount trap can build long-term value for your audience. If you're intrigued by the behind-the-scenes action that shapes the sports industry, this episode is your ticket to understanding the strategies that score big with fans.

Also: Find out why your real competitors in sports business might just be the next family barbecue and how networking, be it through LinkedIn or podcasts, can be a game-changer for industry professionals.

Sam's distinctive perspectives on ticketing make for a fascinating conversation. In this episode, he divulges key takeaways:

- Recognise every action's unintended consequence and manage them proactively. In ticketing initiatives, it’s about creating as many winners as possible while being mindful of the impact on all fans.

- Commit to innovation and progress. Sam's ethos is not to emulate others blindly but to drive change and advance the dialogue in ticketing.

"Let's constantly try and move that conversation forward," Sam urges. "If we all innovate in our respective roles, collectively, we'll achieve greater strides."

Join us for a thought-provoking 25 minutes of in-depth ticketing discourse.

TicketingPodcast.com is powered and sponsored by TicketCo and hosted by TicketCo’s CEO, Carl-Erik Michalsen Moberg.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

What's a day-to-day life like in the English Football League? How should we tackle season ticket no-shows, and what impact will the football governance bill have on ticketing? We're uncovering answers to these questions on ticketingpodcastcom with Sam Earle, events Operations Manager at AFC Wimbledon. At AFC Wimbledon. Hello everyone, welcome to this episode of TicketingPodcastcom, where our guest today is Sam Earle. Unlike many of the other guests in this show, his career in sports industry so far has been a short one. Actually, he only started back in December 2022. It's great to have someone from the outside. Despite his short career, sam Earl is now at his second club. Until recently, he was events and ticketing manager at Sutton United FC. Today, he's events operation manager at AFC Wimbledon. He's also got some really clear views on ticketing. That makes him a brilliant guest at theticketingpodcastcom.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Welcome to the show, sam Earle. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, it's a pleasure. So we are a lot on LinkedIn. Like every other listener on ticketingpodcastcom, and I'm sure you are as well, sam, but looking at one of your recent posts, you wrote the following when trying to sell more tickets, it's often tempting to pull the price lever to encourage people to buy. Price changes, though, tend to be most efficient on new fans, with your assisting fans being quite price elastic. They know how much a game costs and largely accept that price. Understand your point of view, of course, but do you mind elaborating a little bit on this message and what's your thoughts behind it? What's the logics?

Speaker 2: 1:56

yeah. So this was a little bit of a callback to a post I did a few months before that, one where I did a trial where I put the first 100 tickets for a game up for sale at a discounted rate just to see sort of what the uptake would be. I did some ransom analysis and actually found that it was disproportionately first and second time visitors that took up that rate. So people that were regulars or people who walk ups, things like that they weren't tempted by this discounted price. That wasn't an interest to them, which for me was quite interesting in terms of the way they view your ticket pricing. Is that's not a hugely a factor in what tempts them to your stadium, it's more these first and second time visitors. So what I was trying to get across from where was that? There are plenty other ways to engage your regular fan base. You know price is a tool for engaging a new fan base and there's definitely a great place for that. But when you're trying to engage in your current fan base, I think from the ticketing office it can be tempting just to see price as the only way of changing and tempting people in or just relying on the marketing team and saying you know that that's their thing. They need to do that and you know, sutton was a very small team and I really want to focus on the commercial aspect of my role of how can I sell more tickets. So I looked at segmenting my audience, finding certain behaviors that tied in with upcoming fixtures and looking at ways that weren't involved with the price of the ticket to tempt people in. So in that particular post I came up with a tailored message. We know we had a choosing that game. So, um, I found all the previous people that have been to any choosing that game sent them an under the lights come and join us tuesday night. You know, referencing that's their behavior in the past to tempt them to come to a game in the future, and it was a huge success. In that post I outline you know, 42 percent more people have targeted group attended the game than we'd expect and 63% more individual purchasers attended that game.

Speaker 2: 3:47

So for me it's about nudge theory. I think if you just remind people you exist every so often, make it a little bit easier for them to find you. There is a choose net game. We are here, we do exist. That's what it was about, I think. Businesses send out discount codes all the time. It gives you a one-off shot in the arm of that weekend or that sale. But I mean for myself. There's many businesses that I know, if I wait long enough, they're going to send me a discount code, like I don't have to ever buy from the full price, and I really don't want to get that in the mindset of my fan base of if they wait five weeks, eventually I'm going to identify they've not been and and send them a half price offer. So, nutshell, it's about understanding what can be achieved with the data I already had without changing the product or price.

Speaker 1: 4:30

That that's what I was trying to do amazing and I think in a long term, like you're saying right, you want people to pay for the value that they get by watching an amazing football match and that's what you're selling. You're selling the dream, not the ticket, someone said, and I couldn't agree more. But things are happening, sam, even though you've had a short career so far in sports. When you posted a post on linkedin in february this year, you were events and ticketing manager at the league two side and sutton united fc, and today you are in wimbledon. What happened?

Speaker 2: 5:03

that's right. So linkedin again, you know it's. It's the source of all this stuff, this podcast, the new job. So Balserai, the head of operations and revenues here, he saw what I was doing and sort of reached out and we had some conversations, just some open conversations and idea sharing really, and after a little while, you know, opportunity came up to move and I viewed it as a step up in my career. It's really something big to build build here at AFC Wimbledon and, yeah, I achieved great things and there's a great team at Sutton and to get that foot in the door. I think everyone listening to this working sport will know how hard that initial foot in the door is. So I'll always be grateful to what Sutton let me do.

Speaker 1: 5:39

But how did you end up in sports? I mean, I understand the move from Sutton to Wimbledon, but how did you get in there in the first place? That's always interesting to learn more about.

Speaker 2: 5:49

Yeah. So to go back a little while, I was a politics student up at University of Sheffield and ended up working for a member of parliament for a little while and had a few promotions and got to a bit of a crossroads. Politics is an interesting industry where it's very much right place, right time. You can't really control your own career progression in the same way as other industries. In politics so it was kind of I was looking wider and I've always wanted to work in things I'm passionate about. You know there's many industries that will pay people triple or whatever we earn in sport, but you know I want to get out in the morning and love what I do and that politics was love and football was the same thing and I thought it would just be as easy as let's apply to some football clubs and I'll get a job and you know that'll be that.

Speaker 2: 6:30

But it wasn't quite that and I ended up just knocking on doors, you know, guessing people's emails, showing up on match days, asking for conversations, and I was fortunate enough that Tim Allison, at something like that, was one of those that answered that. He had a chat to me before one of their fixtures in the 22 23 season. No job was we spoken about, just talking about the industry. And then about three, four weeks later I got a call saying position had come up, and yeah, that's how I found myself here. So yeah, it's interesting. No one I speak to has a conventional story of how they got into sport I couldn't agree more.

Speaker 1: 7:00

And there's no like school for ticketing either. Right, of course there's a lot of things around sports, but then ticketing in specific, it's all about staying close to the club, being there, talking to people, because that's what the job is about, isn't it? I mean, it's building a network and building a relationship with both the club and the fans. So I mean, we're talking fourth tier football in england here, right coming from the outside. What was your first impression?

Speaker 2: 7:26

I think I underestimated the level of interest and scrutiny there is in what you do. I think obviously as a football fan, you know how much it means to people because you are a fan yourself. But everything you do from setting ticket prices to doing an initiative, to even just moving a flag in the stands you know people care deeply, passionately about what you're doing and they have an opinion on what you do and you can be young, inexperienced, whatever, they just see you as the football club. So that's the biggest thing that I underestimated was the scrutiny. I think in the fourth tier those ties are so much closer than potentially the Premier League, where there were fans that knew my name and knew my face and everything like that that I'd never met before. But he's the ticketing guy and that's the guy you go to with that stuff. So you you become relatively high profile in a small pond and that I think I definitely underestimated that. Yeah, and it was.

Speaker 1: 8:20

it struck me very quickly and that's also what makes it exciting, isn't it? But being the ticketing guy also comes with, maybe, a lot of inquiries and phone calls. I mean, when you were in Sutton you played Rexham right, and that is a super popular game. But sold out Ticketing manager gets a lot of calls, I assume. Can you get me into the match, do you have an extra seat? And the popular questions you guys receive. But a sold out match doesn't automatically mean packed stands, does it? How are you approaching the issue of no-shows on the match Because all the seeds weren't taken?

Speaker 2: 8:58

Yeah. So I think all of us who work in TKT know that there's conventional wisdom that somewhere between 60% and 80% of your season ticket holders won't show up for any given fixture. You know a little bit More than that won't show up for a choosing that game. A little bit less than that won't show up for your derby game, but there's always going to be that contingent that don't come and for a sold-out game and for one that was so big for us in the relegation fight at the time at Sutton, you want to make sure that every opportunity there is to get as packed as possible is there. The atmosphere, revenue would just match the experience point of view. You're going to get a lot of new people through the gates and you want to give them the best atmosphere as possible.

Speaker 2: 9:34

It wasn't something we'd experienced at Sutton before. Really that season we were quite used to to having a thousand to two thousand empty places in the ground. So it was a learning curve for us all, I think, and I really want to approach it from the carrot rather than the stick approach. You know that you see, some clubs will track and penalise those that don't show up, but I really wanted to tie into that, that community focus we had at Sutton, and try and reward those and encourage that goodwill of our supporters to give up their seats. So it was about comms. It was about asking, making sure we were being transparent with the supporters of why we were asking and what we were asking for. Given it was our first time, we had a relatively healthy for the first time, although a very small percentage. But I was quite pleased with the reception and the way the fans responded to the call to arms.

Speaker 1: 10:17

But how big of a problem is the no-shows in English football?

Speaker 2: 10:22

I mean at League Two level. It's an interesting question, right, because it all hinges on the season ticket that we have, and the season ticket performs two core functions, really, which is to get revenue in over the lean summer months and to encourage attendance and attractive fixtures. So whilst we can focus on we had a sellout there and we could have potentially sold more because they didn't show up, you also have to look at the flip side of. Well, actually, we have people in the stadium for a tuesday night unattractive game that, had we not had them, including the season ticket, they may not have shown up for that one. So there are two sides to this coin.

Speaker 2: 10:56

It's very easy to just focus on the negative side of what happens when they don't show up. Well, to be honest, if you didn't have a season ticket, they might not show up to as many games, right. So that's worth bearing in mind. But in those sellout games where we're artificially saying that there's a sellout when there's not, because people have their season tickets but aren't attending, you're artificially restricting new fans from coming to see your ground and your team. So there's definitely a tangible negative, but in terms of for the 92 and the 72 in the football league. I don't think it's a huge problem because I think the upsides of having those season tickets and the season ticket holders attend the other games that aren't the most attractive ones is probably much, much larger than the downside of saying you're sold out when you're not.

Speaker 1: 11:43

Yeah, so there is a huge opportunity to attract people to the games that's not that popular. Yes, that's right. Yeah, makes perfect sense, sam. So politics yes, that's right. Yeah, makes perfect sense, sam. So politics it's the first time we've had a guest with a background from politics, at least that we know of. So not to offend anyone if they have, but we haven't come across it so far. And I mean politics and football goes hand in hand sometimes, and that's also the case with the football governance bill that recently came out. And for our listeners outside of the uk, we have listeners from all over the world on the podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about what the bill is about and why it came about?

Speaker 2: 12:24

yeah, so it was very much in the light of clubs like barry darby, maxfield, numerous others, some communities that sadly don't have their football clubs anymore or have Phoenix clubs rather than the original football clubs in the UK. So it's about looking at the financial sustainability of football in the UK and understanding how we can keep these pillars of local communities in place despite ownership and things like that.

Speaker 1: 12:47

Yeah, I mean there's ownership from all over the world, right, and some people are pulling a lot of money into football, but then others can't do the same and then you have the match day revenue etc. So definitely needed right in one way or the other, but there is also some unwanted consequences that you might not see as a politician. But if we talk about the financial sustainability of English football, do you have any thoughts on that?

Speaker 2: 13:14

I mean, looking at the overviews, yeah, I mean it's an interesting question because since the dawn, really, football has been a loss-making industry. You go right back to the factories and factory owners paying people to play for the teams to have increased the profile of the factories. It it's always been a loss-making industry. It's relatively a modern idea that we move it into a business model, but there has always been a wealthy benefactor underpinning the football club. You know, there's very good clubs that work on a break-even pnl model in a true sense. Vast majority of football clubs still make money around 23 days a season. You, you know, ie every home match day, which for me, you know, there's no other business in the world that really operates like that.

Speaker 2: 13:55

If you, you know, if Apple made money only 23 days a year, the people would be asking questions. You know how? Yeah, like I said, you have to recognize how we got here and it's it's always been underpinned by wealthy benefactors. So is it sustainable in the sense that if we run it on a P&L model that every team is going to break even? Absolutely not. Is it sustainable in the fact that someone is going to write a check and sustain it? Maybe, you know, as long as we've got the right people in those places. That's probably where we're at the moment, right I?

Speaker 1: 14:22

completely agree. But how can the football governance bill help?

Speaker 2: 14:27

the way you see it, that's an interesting one in that we're not going to know how much teeth it has until we see it in action.

Speaker 2: 14:36

In terms of the hard power that it will have to restrict and hold people to account and all those kinds of things, I think we're not going to know how effective it is as a instrument. But going back to my politics degree, that there's a soft power view on this, which is if you know that someone's going to come around to your house and check how tidy it is, you're going to keep your house pretty tidy right, and I think that's probably where the value of this bill is. It's in that soft power of people, knowing that people are watching. There's the scrutiny aspects, and I think that's where we're going to see clubs really clean up the back houses, making sure everything's in order. The more government and the more people are watching what you do and you know kieran mcguire at the price of football podcasts is probably one that holds people to account the most, and you see now clubs engaging with him because they don't want to be on his bad side.

Speaker 1: 15:24

You know, the more people are watching, the better people behave yeah, I agree, so hopefully it'll help and be exciting to follow. For sure, maybe we need to do an episode again with you sometime, sam, just to see your view on it. But I mean, you mentioned that you were surprised by how popular the person who works in football becomes when you start working in sports, which was a big change of going to sports. Did you uncover any other surprises when you started?

Speaker 2: 15:53

I think the main thing that I uncovered when I moved into the industry was there's actually a lot more really forward thinking, great ideas coming through in the football pyramid. I think it unfairly has this perception of being a little bit stuffy and a little bit not innovative, especially as you go down the pyramid, and I think there are a lot of great people working at clubs of all sizes that are trying to move conversations forwards. And you know there's some that look at Tottenham and what they've done there and with their massive stadium and their F1 and go there's no way we could compete with that, why even bother? But there's others that go well, hang on, if they're doing that there, could we do this here, or can we just take a snippet from what they do and can we take a little bit of understanding from what they're doing there? So I think the mindset is shifting to be more innovative and looking at new ways of generating money, and that's kind of what you don't see on the outside until something big happens and everyone sees it?

Speaker 1: 16:53

Yeah, then when something happens, I guess you get phone calls and people asking what's going on. I suppose, right, linkedin messages, yeah, so let's move to linkedin then and talk a little bit about that, because I think that's interesting as, like a social media tool we started using a lot when we started this podcast to understand what's going on in ticketing. Linkedin was our main source and it was also our tool to get in touch with great people like yourself. You're good at sharing, right? Some are sharing a lot, some are sharing much less and some aren't sharing anything at all. Why are you sharing? What makes you share? Maybe you can inspire others.

Speaker 2: 17:37

I mean I started sharing because I was kind of thrown in the deep end at Sutton. I had no ticketing experience and it was kind of just here's the ticketing platform, sell some tickets. You know, there was a bit of some guidance, of course, from you know the ticketing company we had at the time and the director, but it was my job to run it and monetize it essentially. So I largely work things out for myself and I just wanted to use the linkedin community, lean on them a little bit to share what I've been doing, try and get people to engage with what my thoughts. Was I asking the right questions? Was I approaching things in the right way? If you're new to something, you don't always know what the right questions to ask are. So by setting it out on LinkedIn, I saw it as kind of inviting people to tell me I was wrong and tell me that this was conventional wisdom. You're not even starting from the right place. You've completely misunderstood this, and I was looking for the kind of posts that were going to tell me that I was wrong and I didn't see too much out there. So I started posting myself and trying to see what engagement I could get from that, hoping that people would be you know, in the comments going no, this is completely wrong. Have a call with me and I'll tell you what's right.

Speaker 2: 18:45

But I was quite astounded that the reception was really positive and people like yes, this is the way that people should be thinking and yes, this is what we've been doing for years, but no one's talking about it. I didn't know other people across the fence looking at this way and that's kind of where I got to it. And you know, I think for me the reason why I continue to share is I'm not competing with other clubs in the 92 for my ticket sales. Really, like, am I really going to attempt to stop all county fans come watch an afc one wooden game? No, they're not going to travel the length of the country to do that. But what me and stop or county have in common I'm just picking a random club here is that we're trying to solve the same problems. We're trying to fill a stage and we're trying to discuss the same thing. So high tides lift all ships. There's huge value in us all trying to solve the same problem.

Speaker 1: 19:28

There's no point that's trying to doing in silo I agree, and I think that's unique in sports in many ways. Right, you are working with the exactly same things, the same challenges, but you should talk to each other to get inspiration, learn and do things and improve sports all over the place, right? I mean, linkedin is one source, of course, and I think it's super important what you're saying. Do you have any other places to go for inspiration?

Speaker 2: 19:54

yeah, I'm a bit of a sports business nerd. I listen to as many podcasts as I can find. I commute for about an hour at either end of the day so I've got my headphones in. You know, I'm listening to Bloomberg's Business Sport, joe Pompshow, you know all those kinds of yourselves, all those kinds of things in the morning. Just, you know, even though I'm like zombie on the tube, you're taking it in somehow. So, yeah, that's kind of the other place I go to A lot of it. You know might not be relevant to what I'm doing now, but even just hearing about how TV bundles are working in the States, there's always a way that you can apply that to what you're doing.

Speaker 1: 20:26

You mentioned competitors right, Clubs not being competitors and I couldn't agree more. But who are your competitors when you are selling tickets? Even if it's from afc wimbledon or if it used to be in sutton united, who did you look at as your competitor for a match?

Speaker 2: 20:43

day. So I viewed my match day competitors as the cinema, the bowling alley, the mini golf course, family gatherings to a large group of the people that you want to make into your fans. You are just something to do on a saturday afternoon and you have to make your event the thing that is most attractive to do on a saturday afternoon, or something that they can incorporate into those other things. So, yeah, that's how I see it. That's who I'm trying to compete with. Sometimes you want to work with those guys rather than compete with them. You know, I did something with epson racecourse when I was certain let's stop competing, let's start working.

Speaker 1: 21:16

And yeah, that's kind of what I look at yeah, so you're basically competing on a day out exactly that or a day at home in front of the tv. It's also an opportunity, I mean. Thank you so much, sam, for sharing all of these insights. It's super interesting. And in the ticketing podcast, we love traditions and one of the traditions we have is to discuss match day rituals, and that means what do you do the day when you have a big game? What's the first thing you do in the morning, or does your ritual start before that?

Speaker 2: 21:48

please share yeah, so it worked. I'm still sort of finding my feet at wimbledon with what is the best way to work a game. At saturn. It was very much. You know, I was in, was in at 9am setting up hospitality tables. Gung-ho didn't stop until 6pm. So I think my ritual was very much a bit like that. It's picking up whatever needs picking up.

Speaker 2: 22:07

My main ritual comes in when I'm a fan. I think the main thing that I would say for anyone listening that doesn't currently work in sport is it will change your relationship with the sport. You know, and you have to remember that, why you're here and you know you love the sport and that's why we are working essentially. So when I go and watch my team, my phone goes off all day. That's my ritual. I get on the train, I have a coffee, I don't speak to anybody, I check directions, I try and completely switch off and and that's where my my routine comes in it's not I'm working, it's when I'm trying to make sure I can still keep that connection with the sport I love.

Speaker 1: 22:42

Sounds great, and I mean we also have a second tradition, of course. And that is to sum up the key takeaways from this episode. And there's been a lot of interesting stuff today, Sam, but if you would sum it up for us, what do you want our listeners to remember from this conversation?

Speaker 2: 22:58

I think, going right back to when we talked about how people are so interested in what you do to a level you can't anticipate, it's two things. It's one to understand that everything you do has an unintended consequence and you have to control that unintended consequence as far as you can, or at least work through that. When you're doing a ticketing initiative, you are going to create winners and losers and as far as you can, or at least work through that, you know, when you're doing a ticketing initiative, you are going to create winners and losers, and as long as you go into that with open eyes, that's what you need to do. And the second thing is to you know, always innovate and push the conversation forwards.

Speaker 2: 23:27

I probably annoy my colleagues because I'm constantly saying I'm not in the business of doing what other clubs are doing. I'm interested in seeing what they're doing. But if someone comes in, comes back to me with an answer of we're not doing that because nobody else does, that I'm like, well, that's not what I'm in the business of doing. Let's constantly try to move that conversation forward, because if we're all doing that collectively in different places, then we're all going to get so much further.

Speaker 1: 23:48

That's a great key takeaways for sure. Sam. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's been great. I guess we don't need to ask if people want to reach you. You are all over LinkedIn, so that's not going to be a problem.

Speaker 2: 24:03

Too much.

Speaker 1: 24:03

if you ask some of my colleagues, yeah, Hopefully you'll get some interesting requests from good ticketing managers out there, sam, to boost your inspiration even more. Thank you so much for joining this episode today. Thank you for listening. You've been listening to ticketingpodcastcom, where today's guest has been Sam Earle at AFC Wimbledon. Thank you for listening and thank you to our sponsor, ticketco, for powering ticketingpodcastcom. My name is Carl-Erik Moberg. Until next time, have a wonderful day.