Christmas Jerseys - Are the club possibly going to miss out on revenue?

The Sheffield Steelers unveiled this years Christmas jersey earlier on today, and as normal, it was to a mixed reaction from fans.

Personally speaking, I think the jerseys are hilariously awful, exactly how a Christmas jersey should be. Whoever within Rhino Sports designed this years Christmas jersey has done a great job with it.

That being said though, the decision to raffle them off this Saturday instead of Boxing Day seems a very strange thing to do for several reasons, especially from a business perspective. In my view anyway. I'll explain why.

Firstly, Saturday is a TV game. Chances are the attendance may/will be slightly down for a few reasons. The Steelers inconsistent form, it's the lead up to Christmas so people will have less money to hand at this point, plus some people may opt to stay at home and watch the game on TV if they have a Premier Sports subscription. There are a lot of factors that could see the attendance being lower than usual for a Steelers/Devils game or any home game for that matter. If we get say 3500-4000 people in the building on Saturday then the club will have done well in my view.

Compare that to Boxing day where you will almost certainly have in excess of 6000 people in attendance (maybe pushing 7000). People will generally have more money on them as it was Christmas Day the day before (so some will have got extra money in the form of Christmas cards etc), they will still put in towards the 50/50 which is the biggest in the league so that will barely take much of a hit, as I'd expect it to still easily surpass £3500 and maybe even tip past £4000 again, especially with plenty of Panthers fans in town (a Panthers fan has won the 50/50 before after all).

Secondly, there is also the whole point of a Christmas jersey. In my opinion, it's to be worn on the Christmas game. Saturdays game against Cardiff is not a Christmas game. Boxing Day is the Christmas game. You wouldn't wear a Halloween jersey in mid October, or a Valentines jersey at the start of February, would you?

Thirdly, the club went to orange jerseys a few seasons ago to help give the club some renewed identity and it's own colour. Something that could be marketed and sold to the wider audience. This will be the first time this season that the club has played in front of the live TV cameras, so to not play in your usual teams colours quite frankly baffles me. Plus not all the sponsors that the club has on it's normal home jersey appear to be getting the exposure that they normally would if the club wore the home jersey. Judging by the released images, it appears that the sleeves of the jerseys won't have any sponsors logos etc on it at all. So they're not getting all the exposure that they have necessarily paid for and would have expected to get on a TV game. That could possibly upset one or two sponsors.

Now, I have had a very good argument against the above from one of the 50/50 sellers. He has said that when the club had the Halloween shirts, the 50/50 took a small hit in terms of sales and he was asked during the night to switch from selling the 50/50 to help selling the shirt raffle tickets due to the increase in demand and a demand that was higher than expected. Apparently 4000 shirt raffle tickets were sold that night!

That to me though, would have taught the club something about what to expect on Boxing Day. That would have told me that both the 50/50 AND the shirt raffle would be in very high demand that night. The 50/50 is typically in high demand because on the Christmas game it is a notoriously big prize at stake, especially when it is a game against the Panthers. Plus people are always going to be attracted towards the big prize money, especially in the current economic climate.

To counter against the much higher demand and workload with the shirt raffle sales though, all the club surely would have had to do is put in an appeal to fans that they would like to have some extra volunteers to help out on that game. Say maybe an extra dozen people, half of which would help sell the tickets. That way you account for the extra demand for tickets, and you also account for the extra workload behind the scenes, where they count up all the number of tickets sold so as to ensure it matches up against the money brought in. It all has to tie up and balance after all.

Let me give you a quick example of my argument.

Scenario one: Christmas jersey raffled off on Saturday.

Sales of shirt raffle of 3000 tickets = £3000. Sales of 50/50 on Boxing Day of 8000 tickets = £4000.

Total revenue = £7000.

Scenario two: Christmas jersey raffled off on Boxing Day.

Sales of shirt raffle of 4000 tickets = £4000. Sales of 50/50 on Boxing Day of 7500 tickets = £3750.

Total revenue = £7750.

Now, what that second scenario accounts for is the higher crowd in attendance on Boxing Day, thus a higher volume of shirt raffle sales, but it also accounts for the argument that the 50/50 sales would take a small hit. Based on those EXAMPLE figures, it shows that with the way the club has elected to go, they would miss out on revenue of £750. Some may argue that that is a small difference, but it is still a difference and would still be lost revenue.

The only thing those scenarios don't account for is the typical/average shirt raffle sales/revenue produced on a standard home game and a Boxing Day game.

Again, this is all just speculation and is in no way a dig at the club or anything like that, but I just can't help but think that the club are making a mistake by raffling off the jerseys on Saturday instead of Boxing Day.

As always, I hope you've enjoyed the read and any feedback or comments or questions are more than welcome on our Twitter accounts.

@IAmMcCausland
@TomWalkeden
@AwkwardGinge
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Cheers!

Alan
@AwkwardGinge