Stopped going away a few years ago for this reason. Went away religiously in the 90’s, did at least 12 always per season plus always in the cups in the 00’s and carried this on until 2014/15. I never struggled for tickets for anything with my points and then very quickly started to not be able to buy tickets in the first day of sale, that then started to drop to later and later and I wondered why. Then, it was a night game in stretford, on our row was about 8 or 10 Spanish/Portuguese lads. In front of us, 3 Chinese blokes and the more I looked, the people I saw the were just out of place. As regular away-ers, you recognise a lot of people and that really started to wain.
It pissed me off for a while and something just doesn’t sit right with it. Some people are points whores and sell their tickets on, corporates get whatever they want, as do players and shit loads end up on these touting sites.
I didn’t like it so I just stopped. As someone said, this has a huge effect on the away atmosphere (which still sounds pretty decent most of the time) but it’ll continue to get worse unless this kind of shit stops. Before I stopped, there was loads of em, taking fucking selfies, wearing half and half scarves and just generally doing things that proper supporters of a club wouldn’t do. Anyone who wears a half and half scarf at any big away game hasn’t built the points to buy the ticket in my opinion.
I work for a bloke who has 4 seats in the tunnel club. He can have tickets for whatever he wants. He reckons there’s no limit on how many he can have. He says all he needs to do is put a call in and they bend over backwards. Totally wrong as far as I’m concerned.