Blackpool Average Attendance - Is this an issue?

I'm currently managing Blackpool in Dec 2016. Our capacity at Bloomfield Road is 20,000

Here is our average attendace + final league position for every season:

10/11 - 14,898 - 16th

11/12 - 17,139 - 12th

12/13 - 16,390 - 8th

13/14 - 17,113 - 10th

14/15 - 16,274 - 12th

15/16 - 17,798 - 7th

16/17 (so far) - 15,140 - currently 4th

Does this seem right? I would have hoped that we'd be gaining a bigger fanbase considering that we are now firmly established in the Premier League and now having our first forray into Europe.

Just 14,000 fans turned up to see us beat Monaco at home in November. At the very least our average attendance should be higher this season now that we're a Europa League side, top of our group, and challenging for a Champions League place. Instead it's gone down by 2,700. Why would this be? And how can I justify paying a top class player £40k p/w if we only made £390k in gate reciepts for the whole of November?

First off I want some other opinions on whether this is right or not, but also some tips on increasing attendance. We can't expland any more and even though we have plenty of money in the bank my board obviosuly wont build a new stadium if we only sell-out our current one out 2 times a season.

I assume you have made some big name signings in the process of getting those positions? If you are winning with a team of nobodies that might be the reason.

Lassana Diarra, Jack Wilshire, Connor Wickham, Carlos Carmona and Anthony Vanden Borre are at the club now. I've had and sold Michael Chretien, Shaun Maloney, Bofo Bautista, Loic Nestor, Henok Goitom and David Beckham.

Some of those are very well known, others not so much. But as I said, I can't justify bringing in a superstar on £50k p/w if I can't even get 20,000 fans at home.

Chicken and the egg situation if you ask me, fans won't come because you haven't got star names and you won't sign them because no ones watching...

Surely you get enough money from tv and the league prize money (not to mention European football) to pay a few high earners to draw in the fans?

I don't necessarily think the game is right in this instance,any team would fill their stadium for their first European match in decades (or is it first ever for Blackpool?)

I agree, I think when we are on a good run (i'd won 5 games in a row in all competitions), then face a well-known European side in AS Monaco, the fans should be out in droves for that game.

My top earner is on £45k p/w (he was on 19k but I had to up it to stave off interest from Barce and Bayern, he's a world class regen), but after that my next few biggest earners are on 34k (Wilshire), 30k (Diarra) and 29k (Nam Tae-Hee). We end every season just about in the black, and nowadays I have to be careful spending too much on transer fees. My biggest signings in the last 3 seasons have been on free transfers. We aren't making enough money in gate reciepts and sponserships for me to spend £20m + £50k p/w on a player with a big rep.

Recently i've been forced to become a selling club, we've made a net profit on transfers every transfer window for the last 3 years, because otherwise we would be in the red. I haven't spent more than £7m on one player ever, and since I started at Blackpool our overall net transfer profit is £9m. All of this is be necessity.

Ah and there lies the crux of the problem. Spend and attendances will go up, but fail to hit it really big and end up like Leeds, Portsmouth and potentially Liverpool if the new owners don't support them.

This is the first time I've heard the game actually modeing real life, in previous versions it was far to easy to drag small clubs into the big time with soaring profits and new stadiums galore.

Doesn't help you very much, seems like si got the realism factor spot on, possibly at the expense of fun.

Perhaps, I think you can make that argument for sure. Perhaps i'm biased because i'm the one managing Blackpool and I obviously would like a little more revenue coming in so I didn't have to be so frugal.

At the moment all i'm doing is buying decent young players, nurturing them into good Premier League players and selling them for a profit, then repeating the cycle. Obviously i've got experience through the spine of my team (Benoit Costil, Pape Diakhate, Lassana Diarra, Carlos Carmona) but the bulk of the squad is made up of players i've bought for £500k or so and know i'm going to have to sell for £5m in a couple of seasons. I'd like to be able to stretch my legs a bit.