Shrewsbury Town target a 6,000 fan-base
Chief executive Brian Caldwell has targeted a regular fanbase of 6,000 to help fulfil Shrewsbury Town's ambition of eventually reaching the Championship.
Caldwell wants to see half of the 4,000 'floating fans' that attended the Manchester United FA Cup tie return to the Greenhous Meadow on a regular basis.
Town's biggest home league gate of the season – 7,019 – attended the visit of Port Vale on Good Friday when the away support was 1,300.
A similar gate is to set to attend Saturday's home clash against high-flying Wigan.
Asked if he wants to see average home crowds of 6,000, Caldwell said: "We're looking for that.
"We've got 3,000 season ticket holders and at St Mirren we had 2,700 but they've got Celtic and Rangers on their doorstep.
"Paisley has a similar population to Shrewsbury of 70,000 but here there's not another league team within almost an hour.
"If we can't get more people here supporting their local team, we're doing something wrong.
"We had 4,000 extra people supporting us for the United game who'd been to some games this season, so we need those back.
"Even if half of them came, that would add 2,000 to our average, so we'd have 6,000 of our own fans."
Town spent 10 years in the second tier from 1979-89 and Caldwell believes the potential is there to reach the Championship.
The Scot reckons the key is by increasing support and has targeted continued work in the community to try to achieve it.
He said: "Clubs of this size have been in the Championship before so there's no doubt it can. Lots of people have a soft spot for Shrewsbury, but we want to get more of them here.
"We saw that with the Coventry game – we had over 6,000 on a Tuesday night with maybe 1,100 from Coventry. We can grow that even more with the potential throughout Shropshire and in Wales."
