It’s all been the clubs fault. They’ve done so much right but when it’s come to the fans and the ground they’ve done a hell of a lot wrong.
They did everything in the wrong order.
They firstly fucked off - with no consultation - 6000 fans from the North Stand and created an un-needed (in its size) Family Stand. Other than the two title winning games the Family Stand has never been full despite games being “SOLD OUT” and fans not being able to buy tickets even though many want to. The fans who were evicted were moved to different parts of the ground, some were moved to seats that were £100 more expensive than they were paying in the North Stand, some were told they couldn’t sit next to friends or family they’d sat next to for years, some were so disillusioned with the move they never came back to the stadium.
Then - with no consultation - they upped SeasonCard prices by something like £75, £65, £50 and £50 season-on-season. Then froze it for a year. Then upped them by £50 again. Since that Agüerooooo moment my card has gone up from (IIRC) £560 to £800. For a large number of people the conintual rises made them decide to give up their SC. For me (combined with the growth of the number of cup games we’ve had over the years) it’s stopped me being able to afford go to as many away games as I used to.
Then they moved the Singing Section to the single worst place in the ground it could possibly be. It’s isolated between the away fans to its right, a corporate area above and the quiet CBell stand to its left. This is especially worse for cup games where they may as well not even bother turning up when there’s 7000 away fans above them. And it is the smallest Singing Section I relation to capacity of any ground anywhere. Plymouth Argyle’s (just one example plucked from thin air) Singing Stand holds 5000 in a 16,388 stadium; Stockport County’s Cheadle End holds 5400 in a 10,841 stadium. You can pick any ground in any league in any country and find everyone has a bigger Singing Section either in its own capacity or percentage of overall capacity. SSL1 only holds about 3000!
Then they started putting tickets on foreign travel package sites and we have groups of non-City fans going to games. Tourists who don’t give a shit about the club and smile when the opposition score (that’s even happened with United and Rooney scoring once at our ground when we had people in the home stand smiling and taking pictures of Rooney sliding on his knees).
Then they started the eviction process again with the rise of corporate areas. With the same outcome as when they did it in the North Stand.
The very first thing they should have done was target the Singing Section and make that the priority. Liverpool Kop 12000, Villa Holt 14000, SheffU Kop 145000. That’s what we should be aiming for. We should have done that first before anything else was ever done. Any City Sq, any CFA, any SSL3, any New York/Melbourne etc., anything at all. Number one should have been a proper singing stand. Then the rest should have followed but the Family Stand should be half the size, it has not worked.
There are cheaper tickets available but that came after the big price rises came in and people had already left the match going support and there aren’t actually that many. It’s not like Bayern and other German clubs who have 12000 cheap tickets. If we have more than a few hundred I’d be surprised.
