Barnsley

[Atomic]

For the Villa play off game we probably could've got another 10,000 "Albion fans" attending the game. No, these are not people that attend regularly, these are more the type that go to play off finals (i.e. 43,000 vs Port Vale back in 1993). They will be Albion fans and mostly among the 55,000 ish we have on our database.

On the stadium expansion thing. Do people realise we have a regular 22,000 home fans. If we had an FA Cup tie vs Villa / Wolves the opponents would be entitled to the whole of the Smethwick End. That is over 5,000 tickets leaving around 20,500 (given all the advertising etc) which means there would be a number of "REGULAR" fans not able to get a ticket. That's not on for me and for that reason alone a stadium expansion to around 30,000 would be perfectly justified.

Not sure that is strictly true... Up to 15% can be allocated for the away team in the FA Cup(3,900 ish)... and the local safety groups can see the 15% reduced (Arsenal gave Everton just 9% in 2014 http://www.thefa.com/news/2014/feb/26/aw...al-everton), so we could just give them 2,500 - 3,000. (or at least that was what the rules were in 2014, which was all my quick search returned). Normal away capacity is 3,000 currently.

I'm not certain of all if's and but's of it, but you get my point. Man Utd / Liverpool / Man City etc would almost certainly get the whole stand, we can't give 3,900 due to the lay out of the stadium, it's either 2,737 (with segregation), 2,000 (as we're allowing this season) or the whole of the Smethwick (5,496).

The normal away capacity at the moment is 2,000 not 3,000.