After giving fans the matchday magazine free to those who attended the Vitesse game, Saints are set to repeat the excersise for the visit of FC Midtjylland.
It is of course a nice gesture for Saints to give their supporters something for free and from that point of view it should not be ridiculed, but of course Saints do have a motive in doing so and that is to reintroduce the matchday magazine (programme to you & me) to a crowd that has perhaps not bought it in the past 18 months after the bad publicity when Nicola Cortese sacked the programme sellers, some of whom had been employed by the club for 30 years and replaced them with smartly uniformed youngsters who looked like they should be working in Hollister rather than selling programmes to the masses.
The upmarket approach did not work and many stopped buying in protest.
Now Saints need to boost sales and of course educate the supporters to a different kind of matchday programme, one that is more magazine as the title implies than something that you can fold in half and stick in your back pocket.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this and it is a great sales aid to give it away free for a game or two to get people into the habit of wanting to buy one again.
Now branded not as a programme but as SAINTS, the issue to be given away for the FC Midtjylland game includes exclusive interviews with captain José Fonte and FC Midtjylland’s former Saints midfielder Tim Sparv, who returns to St Mary’s 8 years after leaving the club for Halmstad