Peterborough United Football Club want, need and deserve more fans. The club has a substantial catchment area, but despite that, the home gates are still quite low, averaging less than 6,000 for League games this season before the visit of Leeds United, although they are better than they have been in recent years.

We believe that in the long term the gates could be very much greater and we will hopefully have a new stadium before too long, if all goes to plan, and we want to see it filled! That's one of the reasons why The Posh Supporters' Trust is so keen to orchestrate a drive to get more fans.

We now have a club that has a determined and positive chairman, a young manager with an attack minded philosophy for his teams and who is someone who has fostered a great team spirit. As fans we have the privilege of watching a rare and magical talent in George Boyd, one of the key players helping the club make progress on the pitch. Watching him play is worth the admission price on its own!

The Posh Supporters' Trust, with the full support and co-operation of the Football Club, initiated an idea to get more people in our community interested in their local football club. The scheme, especially focused on families, introduces new supporters to the club by giving them a taste of Football League action for free. Not only do they get to go to one free match at London Road, they also get a half price ticket voucher for another specified match at a later date, immediately giving them an incentive to keep coming to Posh.

For many people, going to a football match, perhaps for the first time, can be an intimidating and scary experience and our idea at the Trust is to make it as enjoyable and safe as possible. We do this by personally greeting those coming and allocating a section of the Family Stand to all those coming. This is only possible thanks to the club giving us those tickets in the first place to distribute in a controlled manner.

Our aim of course is to get the newcomers to become occasional and then regular fans as a result of enjoying the match day experience. Because we can keep in touch with them, we and the club can encourage them back, advertise promotions and track how the scheme is progressing.

We carried out our first New Posh Fans Initiative match at the end of last season and it was a great success, (except that Posh lost the match!) with a lot of children coming along, something that was particularly pleasing because they are the fans of the future. The club was happy enough to ask us to give it another go this season and so here we are today doing just that for the visit of Colchester United!

The way that we work the scheme is that we select one ward in the city, preferably one where there could have been quite a lot of newcomers to the city and deliver a leaflet to every house or flat in the ward, inviting those households to apply to the Trust for the free tickets. For this game the council ward is Werrington North. In the long term we hope to cover many, if not all, of the wards as well as some of the outlying villages. We want to find new and committed fans, but we will also have succeeded if we help gain more interest in the club, making people more aware of their local team.

At the Trust we strongly believe that everyone should feel proud of the club - seeing it as part of their individual civic pride and for them to be as actively involved with it as they can be, and we want the club to involve the community as much as possible in their activities which increasingly they do.

The Statistics
Just under 1,000 tickets were made available to the Trust, 3,200 leaflets were delivered by 20 volunteers on Sunday 19th October. Applications were oversubscribed within a few days of leafleting. In total 326 letters were received applying for 1,352 tickets.

The scheme just couldn't work without the voluntary support of dedicated fans helping out and we would like to thank Paul Froggitt, Graham Palmer and his wife, Andrew Hornsby, Keith Jennings, Geoff Callen, Nathan Foster, Chris Boyce, Paul Stevenette (and a friend of his!), Steve Turner, Trevor Johnson, Paul Mitchell and family, Walter Moore, Kerry Weaver and Ellie Moore.

Thanks also to Charters Bar and Oakham Ales for their generous sponsorship of The New Posh Fans Initiative and to Barry Bennett for his invaluable assistance. Finally a very special thanks to Kathryn Cronk for all her support (and patience) with the administration, packing and posting and to John Henson the master organiser.

Peter Lloyd
Vice-Chair, The Posh Supporters' Trust