If comparisons are odious, fate provided one that at Spanish It could make you feel really bad. This Tuesday, shortly before the parakeet club presented the numbers of its subscription campaign, it announced Betis, which has already reached 70,000 members. Light years away from 27,311 members and 21,681 subscribers with which it has, as of September 30, the entity chaired by Chen Yansheng. Some figures that the deputy director general, Toni Alegre, framed in a growth phase but in reality they do nothing more than confirm the depopulation of the RCDE Stadium.
Four out of ten seats in the Espanyol stadium have been vacated since it opened in 2009. The pull effect, despite the fact that the team miraculously escaped relegation the previous season and that the crisis had already begun, led to 35,600 parakeets will be paid that first seasonso that in just 13 years they have lost 13,919 subscribers along the way, to be exact 39.09 percent. But the opening of Cornellà -El Prat is not the only decisive date in this gradual process.
In the summer 2018coincidentally the date that Espanyol now takes as a reference to justify its presumed stability, is the exact point at which the loss of social mass accelerated. It was then that the CEO, Roger Guasch, decided to unfold the traditional single card by one of partner (of a maximum of 60 euros) and the subscriber, which actually gives the right to occupy a seat in the stadium.
In that terrifying campaign, passed the club of 27,308 subscribers who had presented in October 2017 to only 20,358. A debacle. And, although it is true that recovered to 23,128 with the entry to Europe and that both the decline and the pandemic could strongly affect renewals and new registrations, that decision to separate cards continues to cost a massive eviction today.
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Only in the last five years, since 2017, Espanyol has lost 5,627 subscribers, that is, 20.6 percent. Or what is the same, in its fourteenth season of existence, the RCDE Stadium sees how 18,139 of its 40,000 seats, practically half, do not have an assigned owner, when at its inauguration there were only 4,400 free seats. And the worst thing is that there are no signs on the horizon that suggest that the trend will reverse or, at least, will stop.