Sunderland look forward to their biggest season for decades, with a squad aiming to build on a truly remarkable seventh-place finish in the Premier League with a first European campaign in over half a century.

With this success comes increased demand – the Stadium of Light was sold-out for every home match last season; away game tickets are often rarer than hen’s teeth; and the advent of a Europa League campaign, where clubs only need to sell a maximum of 5% of their capacity to away fans, means the demand for tickets to a Sunderland game will be unprecedented.

The club have, therefore, launched the Black Cats Membership scheme, which they have declared to ‘bring every supporter closer to the club, wherever they follow from’.

Of course, it’s up to you to decide what you’re going to do. Many will sign up, some may be on the fence, some might not see it as providing any kind of value at all.

So, let’s take a look at some of the questions around it.

Is it a cash grab?

If every single fan on the 15,000-strong waiting list for a season ticket buys a membership – which will now be the only way you’d get a sniff of ever getting a season ticket in future – that’ll bring £720,000 into the club.

If every single season ticket holder – estimated to be 38,000 of us – goes on to buy a membership bolt-on to their ticket, that’s £760,000 into club coffers.

A scheme that will bring just under £1.5million a year into the club doesn’t feel like much of a cash grab. That’d barely cover the wages of a first-team player.

Does this add value?

With the carrot of increasing your chances of getting a ticket to a Europa League away game being dangled in front of season ticket holders, many, rightly or wrongly, will consider a £20 surcharge a small price to pay.

But in truth, this scheme does not add any real value at all to season ticket holders.

When you look at some of the features on offer with the scheme, it’s clear that the ticketing issue was at the forefront of the club’s thinking.

Everything else around it is fairly woolly, promising priority access to club events or access to in-store events throughout the season.

Those have been offered to season ticket holders in the past, and have been very few and far between anyway, in all honesty.

Also, any kind of money-off offers float about for a bit then disappear into the ether. There was once a 20% discount on drinks inside the stadium bowl for season ticket holders – that just ebbed away.

This, like previous offers, feels like it’s been tacked on to the main reason they’ve come up with the scheme in the first place – and that’s to find a way to engage with the supporters who aren’t season ticket holders, but want to be.

Monetising the 15,000 fans that are on the waiting list

It’s a measure of the club’s resurgence that we’re getting sold-out fixtures week-on-week. And it doesn’t really feel that long since the Premier Concourse was closed to fans due to lack of demand.

We weren’t regularly selling out last time we were in the top flight, even when we were riding the crest of a wave under Roy Keane, or Steve Bruce when we finished tenth. It does feel like something has changed in that respect, that the club have brought the supporters along on the ride and everyone is invested in it, without any kind of drop-off.

Considering the club have been publicly talking about this kind of idea for six months, the announcement over the new membership scheme is no surprise, and feels like the logical next step.

It’s probably the best option available to the club right now to get some value out of fans that can’t engage with the club other than buying merchandise. And there’s only so much merch you can drop in a season. Some might disagree on that…

The only way to properly solve the issue of 15,000 people waiting for season tickets, quite simply, is expanding the stadium – and the most conservative quotes are saying this will cost an incredible ten times the initial build cost of the entire Stadium of Light.

That tells you two things – Sir Bob Murray really did do a superb job on delivering a 40,000 capacity stadium for £15million; and 26 years since the last expansion of the stadium probably hints that the time is right to put some serious capital investment in.

That’s something that will not happen overnight, we know that. But the Stadium of Light is rare in the Premier League in that it can be expanded without too much friction.

There are no houses that need to be bought up and knocked down, like Liverpool had to do.

Everton had to move from Goodison Park and fill in a dock to increase their capacity.

Newcastle will have to demolish their entire ground and build on a park in order to deliver more seats.

Manchester United have a railway line hampering their expansion and have had to announce plans to move Old Trafford 350m down the road in order to add to their 76,000 capacity.

Sunderland’s task is fairly simple in comparison to their rivals – get planning permission, dig up a car park, build the thing. A move that could add thousands of seats and millions of pounds to the club’s most prized and valuable asset.

Some would say, of course, the fans are the club’s most valuable asset. But you can’t monetise those, can you? The club, however, may disagree on that.

Making it a fairer process for all

In announcing the new scheme, SAFC Supporters Collective elected member Matthew Foreman said:

“The new away ticket ballot gives more fans, especially younger supporters, a genuine chance to experience the away days that mean so much to our fanbase. As supporter representatives, we were involved throughout, and it’s a real example of the club listening and acting on what we told them.”

This, of course, suggests that the previous system is inherently unfair. And I’m afraid I’d have to push back on that.

Yes, I would say that from the comfort of being a season ticket holder for some years, but, being brutally honest, the system we have had – season ticket holders get priority, based on how many games they have gone to in the past – is the fairest way of doing this.

There have been some well-publicised abuses of this, from individuals bumping up their Black Cats Points and then selling their tickets on, but that has been a tiny percentage.

There are people who go to every away game that they can – and fair play to them. The suggestion that this is somehow unfair or greedy is laughable.

I can’t remember there being a queue of people demanding to go to Cheltenham away, or banging on the doors at Crewe because they didn’t have enough points, that those greedy folk inside are nicking all the good games.

It’s only right that the people who have made a huge commitment, both financial and personal, to following the Lads home and away through the thick and the thinnest of thin times in our entire history, should be at the front of the queue.

I’m not sure how I feel about the suggestion that some of those people might not get tickets to one of our European away games, while someone who hasn’t been actively supporting the club for that long takes their place in the queue.

And that’s exposing the issue with the entire scheme there.

Previously, the club had two slightly undefined tiers of supporter. Season ticket holders, and those without season tickets.

By baking in these clearly-defined new tiers and offering priority to those willing (and able) to pay a little more creates a situation where those tiers of supporters will end up resenting each other. Especially when one who has paid £600 for a season ticket misses out for an away game to another just because they paid £48, or £20, for the privilege.

The club have gone in with the best of intentions, and they are, admittedly, stuck in terms of what they can do. But in attempting to make the system fairer, it feels like they’ve made it that little bit more unfair.