布雷福德場大豐收

來源: The Guardian 編輯：Vicki

這可以看作是足球市場收獲滿盈的一個夏季，John Terry收入豐厚，Cristiano Ronaldo去了皇家馬德里，而 Gareth Barry 則返回了利物浦并在曼徹斯特收獲了一個更高的收入。布雷福德昨日以2：1戰勝 Burnley ，這是Paul Jewell球隊10年來一直夢寐以求的事——希望能夠進入超級聯賽的第一賽季。

Bradford City reap rewards of filling their stadium, not their pockets

This is turning out to be football's summer of money, with John Terry being pelted with （被撞擊）pound notes, Cristiano Ronaldo going to Real Madrid（皇家馬德里） for a record fee（登錄費） and Gareth Barry turning his back on a dream move to Liverpool for the sake of bigger wages at Manchester City.

Anyone who objects to such lavish （過分慷慨的）spending and obscene（可惡的） amounts of cash being waved under players' noses will be relieved to know that life is carrying on much the same as usual in Yorkshire, where top-flight football may currently be as fanciful（富于幻想的） a myth as Ronaldo's take-home pay but value for money is still an important consideration.

Bradford City, in particular, have just ensured five-figure season-ticket sales for the third year running, no mean feat for a team in the fourth tier. The Bantams appear in no imminent（即將發生的） danger of gaining promotion to League One – despite a strong start last season they were out of contention for even a play-off place by Easter – yet they have the division's attendance（出席人數） record virtually sewn up.

As a result of an innovative 2007 scheme whereby ticket prices were slashed to £138 per season on the condition that sufficient supporters signed up to the offer, the club sold 12,000 season tickets, three times more than anyone else in the division. Last season Bradford changed their offer to "buy one, get one free", falling 700 short of their initial target of 9,000 season tickets but still ending up with average gates of 12,700 per home match, twice as many as Luton in second place and three or four times better than most of their League Two rivals. They eventually sold more than 11,000 season tickets.

For the coming season, Bradford announced last Christmas that season tickets would be available for just £99 and £138 to supporters willing to sign up early, and though the official price went up to £175 in March and is now £250, the take-up on the offers means that almost 10,000 have already been sold.

There is a drawback（缺點）, of course. Because of the reduced prices Bradford are not making two or three times as much money as their rivals. Roughly speaking, they have dropped their prices by half and gained twice as many supporters, so income-wise they are little better off. Yet the matchday experience at Valley Parade is better for all concerned when there are 12,000 in the ground rather than 5,000 or 6,000, subsidiary revenue （輔助收入）goes up and all the young spectators enticed in（慫恿，誘惑） by the cheap rates are potentially Bradford supporters for the future.

"The principle is affordable（付得起的） season tickets," explains David Baldwin, a Bradford board member and the club's director of operations. "We are the only league football club in Bradford, which is quite a large city, and we didn't feel like sitting back and accepting the fact that only about 5,000 people seemed to want to come and watch us.

"Football should be affordable to everybody whatever the economic climate, and we thought we were in a good position to make the demographics（人口特征） of the city work for us. We thought people would want to be involved as long as the price was right, and we have been proved correct.

"The key to it is that you have to repackage the offer every season, find a new hook to pull people in, otherwise it goes stale. Every year we've done a different thing, put a different spin on the season tickets."

Bradford beat Burnley 2-1 in a friendly yesterday, a reminder that it is exactly 10 years since Paul Jewell's team were also looking forward with some trepidation （顫抖）to a first season in the Premier League. The Bantams lasted two years at the top, a year more than anyone had predicted, though their subsequent decline was swifter and more pronounced than anything that befell（發生，降臨） Leeds, Barnsley or Sheffield Wednesday. So Bradford are not an unmitigated （純粹的）success story, though they do know they are an asset valued by their community.

"We have come back down through the divisions, but we have avoided getting trapped in a circle of decline," Baldwin says. "The most gratifying （令人滿足的）thing we have found, whenever we have a new initiative or an open day, is that people respond in their thousands. They want to get behind the club, and we want to facilitate that."

Keke View：皇家馬德里足球俱樂部（Real Madrid Club de Fútbol ，中文簡稱為皇馬，前稱馬德里足球會，Madrid Club de Fútbol。）是一家位于西班牙首都馬德里的足球隊，成立于1902年3月6日，是現今歐洲乃至世界球壇最成功俱樂部，2000年12月11日國際足球協會（FIFA）選出皇家馬德里為20世紀最偉大的球會。