Away fans get in the home ends when home fans don't buy up tickets. That's always been the case. I did that at Blackburn away and elsewhere, and I am sure you've done it too. I also celebrated like mad at Blackburn too.
City need to do more than just wash their hands of season ticket holders not joining the Cup Schemes and come up with something better than to just ignore local fans and list chunks of hundreds of tickets together on football tour sites when proper City fans can’t get two seats next to each other anywhere in the stadium buying through the club, never mind a family or group of mates.
City need to be more local, be more ‘Manchester’ (that is our name, afterall), do more to get more Mancunians going to CL games. And before you get your race card out again, that includes all Mancunians from anywhere in the city of any skin colour.
I live in Wythenshawe, Manchester’s biggest district by some distance, a district with shit loads of City fans, yet City are not a presence here at all. If you didn’t have a tele, the internet or smartphone and lived round here, you wouldn’t know City existed. They’re far more bothered about taking trophies and ex-players on tour to Boston and Bangkok than they are Baguley.
And while most people do have those things, and while many do go to City, there are also many across the whole city who find that they can’t afford both a season ticket and all the cup games so come out of the Cup Schemes… or if they don’t have a season ticket, they can’t afford £52.50 and £71 in the same week for Madrid and Newcastle so have to pick and choose.
I think it’s already gone too far but before they lose the lot of us, our boardroom need to travel to Germany and see how their clubs do it. Instead of following the American model and Madrid model of anybody from anywhere at any price, they need to learn how the German clubs look after their core fanbases. Bayern look after their fans much
much better than City do yet still smash record revenue figures every year. City don’t have to ruin our support to hit the revenue they want to.
Liverpool have great initiatives for their local fans: 1 week before tickets go on sale to anyone else, people with an ‘L’ post code get to buy tickets first. Also, all children’s tickets are £9 in every stand (bar the new AR 2nd tier). On Saturday for City against Newcastle, children’s tickets start at £41. If our chikdren’s tickets cost £9, maybe a local Dad+lad could have gone to both Madrid and Newcastle games.