Organising a national campaign for away tickets is far easier than organising one for home tickets - lobbying the Premier League as one for away tickets worked well because it's reasonable enough to expect and request all away fans to pay a single set price for an away ticket.
Home tickets are a different kettle of fish altogether because each club has all manner of pricing levels for each game plus every fanbase is different in terms of how affluent they are. You can't expect every club to adopt exactly the same prices across the board for home tickets so we have to tackle our clubs individually on it. Scudamore acknowledged a couple of months back that something had to be done about away tickets but said the Premier League can't realistically intervene when it comes to home tickets. Liverpool fans staged just one walkout and achieved an unexpected u-turn. Whatever option we adopt, we could achieve similar success providing enough people make their feelings known.
We're approaching a tipping point here where even long-standing loyal fans are getting disillusioned with the way the club prices certain games. Not only that, we must be the only club in the league that gives no indication at the start of the season as to what the pricing will be for each game apart from the Champions League group games once the draw has been made. Pretty much every other match is done on an ad hoc basis so fans really don't have an idea where they're up to.
I've said it before but I've defended the club's pricing on games in the past - I also had a huge run-in with JMA on here about 5 or 6 years ago when he launched into a withering rant against Cook and the price of season tickets because at the time I and many others felt we were still getting very good value for money. That was at a time when our season tickets were priced a lot more reasonably than they are now (save for the new level 3 SS seats of course) and before the platinum scheme came in but since then I feel the club are trying to unnecessarily squeeze too much out of us. My ST has probably increased in price by nearly 70% in that time (nearly 60% if I'd gone gold) - others will have seen theirs increase even more. As things stand I can still afford it and £40 for my seat for the PSG game isn't totally outrageous but that doesn't mean I'm not going to stand side by side with those fans who have been priced out. We can't fill the ground for most Champions League games as it is - in fact, we've had more City fans in the ground for FA Cup games against Championship opposition over the past few seasons than we have for some CL games over the past few seasons. The fact that those FA Cup games were priced at £15-£20 and £1-£5 for kids tells us that this is indeed a pricing issue. Of course, I'm not expecting prices like that for a home quarter final in the CL but a bit more commonsense from those that make the decisions would see this game sell out. The Rags can hurl as many jibes as they want about empty seats but if we can fill our ground for early round FA Cup games against lower division opposition then that proves the support is there.
