Belgian Fans (merged)

[Two Gun Bob]

It's a pretty weird logic you use regarding the deffinition of entitlement. A Pecking order practicly by definition is about one above the other, while having no point system at all would imply a more level playing field. Lets take an analogy of a supermarket where one buys more than another customer, and then would argue that he should get priority in the waiting line before an other because of it. Well that stuff doesn't get done really, although the arguement could be that a more loyal customer should always be first in line.

From a nuanced view i can understand the reasoning behind a point system, epecially if the club finds its stadium often not filled enough and would want to stimulate sales by that way. In analogy that would be the same as that supermarket allowing loyal customers to get in front of the line if it would consider that this would stimulate it's revenue further. However eitheway it would never be up to the customer to decide on that policy, the policy would exist or not by the grace of the management.

It's not youre football club, it's not the football club of anyone here. And somehow i get the impression that some people consider that some fans here are "higher in level" than others somehow, as if you wee a level 10 fan and i a level 1 fan.But do you really believe that new fans would want to subscribe to that notion, as if they would need to shup up when the veterans take the word whatever nonsense might flow from their mouths? Personally i consider myself pretty much the equal here of anyone else regardless of how muchg matches i went too, and in my view whoever person here things he is a higher level fan than the other has made those standards for his own sake of prestige and bennifit but would be naive to think that the majority would want to recognise it.

But i won't say the point system has to go, imho it's all up to the club, and simmilarly so if they decide to neglect it, and you should take it up with them and not with the people who gratefully take the opportunity when it presents itself. Do you really lack so much emphaty to understand that foreign fans really don't care for that point system, and will feel no remorse for taking the opportunity when it presents itself? You know, if those 200 Belgians hadn't bought those tickets, likely another 200 Belgians would have and taken their place.

When you say this is not your club you do cause offence my friend albeit unintentionally.
To many but not most this is not just sport but a passion that goes beyond any rational of the word passion .
On a fan level I love and adore City but it is not my whole life.No it is not .
I think about city every day and I try to attend as many games as possible given the nature of my job.
Saturday games are incredibly difficult and I have to return immediately back to work.
With circa 5000 points I can achieve most away games sometimes with the help of some fine characters who inhabit this blessed and hallowed circle we all move in.

Where do I exist on a fan level-ometer...call me a good respectable 7.75 if you please (beams with pride)
There are people at our club however that inhale infuse and actually breath City.
It flows and ebbs throughout their veins like some tidal river permeating into the corpuscles of their minds eye !
It goes beyond passion my good friend and beyond the explainable.
Holidays family and work commitments,fraternity and life itself all take a back seat to accommodate the persuate of this dream.
Nineteen aways and nineteen homes with friendly s and cup ties and non are ever missed.
These veterans of many a campaign who stay to the end and travel in pissing rain and hail sleet and snow and are the veritable pulse of this club.
They actually do merit recognition and reward from the hierarchy and were rightly disenchanted when the bean counters introduced platinum.
I know of one fine supporter who was taken very ill many many years back and would not allow the stretcher bearers to remove
him from the ground until the penalty was taken and converted.A brilliant human being and a pleasure to find myself in his occasional company.
So yes this is their club and it is our club and it is my club and the club of our new member's who continue to swell our ranks and procreate our continued expansion into utter brilliance.
This fine club does not own the club and our players only borrow their shirts that we ever so kindly lend to them.
It will always be the supporters and fanbase that own this club.
Merry Christmas Flemish man and I hope to see you at Sunderland away on a cold and wet midweek night for a stein or two of your Belgian Artois.
Reassuringly expensive.
Adios I have to go now because it double taxi fare time in ten minutes oh yes indeed

 

[ballinio]

When you say this is not your club you do cause offence my friend albeit unintentionally.
To many but not most this is not just sport but a passion that goes beyond any rational of the word passion .
On a fan level I love and adore City but it is not my whole life.No it is not .
I think about city every day and I try to attend as many games as possible given the nature of my job.
Saturday games are incredibly difficult and I have to return immediately back to work.
With circa 5000 points I can achieve most away games sometimes with the help of some fine characters who inhabit this blessed and hallowed circle we all move in.

Where do I exist on a fan level-ometer...call me a good respectable 7.75 if you please (beams with pride)
There are people at our club however that inhale infuse and actually breath City.
It flows and ebbs throughout their veins like some tidal river permeating into the corpuscles of their minds eye !
It goes beyond passion my good friend and beyond the explainable.
Holidays family and work commitments,fraternity and life itself all take a back seat to accommodate the persuate of this dream.
Nineteen aways and nineteen homes with friendly s and cup ties and non are ever missed.
These veterans of many a campaign who stay to the end and travel in pissing rain and hail sleet and snow and are the veritable pulse of this club.
They actually do merit recognition and reward from the hierarchy and were rightly disenchanted when the bean counters introduced platinum.
I know of one fine supporter who was taken very ill many many years back and would not allow the stretcher bearers to remove
him from the ground until the penalty was taken and converted.A brilliant human being and a pleasure to find myself in his occasional company.
So yes this is their club and it is our club and it is my club and the club of our new member's who continue to swell our ranks and procreate our continued expansion into utter brilliance.
The club does not own the club and the players only borrow their shirts we ever so kindly lend to them.
It will always be the supporters and fanbase that own this club.
Merry Christmas Flemish man and I hope to see you at Sunderland away on a cold and wet midweek night for a stein or two of your Belgian Artois.
Reassuringly expensive.
Adios I have to go now because it double taxi fare time in ten minutes oh yes indeed

Superb post .

 

[FlemishDuck]

I think about city every day and I try to attend as many games as possible given the nature of my job.

For reasons of peacepipesmoking ill choose my reply's sellectivly. I know the feeling mate, i can't wait to see the next City match. ;)

Merry Christmas Flemish man and I hope to see you at Sunderland away on a cold and wet midweek night for a stein or two of your Belgian Artois.
Reassuringly expensive.

Ill let you in on a secret, our export beers is are not the ones we'd rather keep all to ourselfs. Remind me to take a crate of that extremely exclusive Westvleteren 12° with me, reassuringly expensive would be an understatement. I'm sure i could say a lot of shit and still make friends with that.

Merry Christmass to you to. No sour grapes here.

 

[RACHACE]

Flemish. Your kind simply follow the club not support it. Those that support it are more deserving of a ticket than you. End of.

This must be a wind up though surely.

 

[Tim of the Oak]

I've rationalised that the best way to continue to guarantee myself prestige away tickets is to join the Belgium Supporters Club!

 

[sky tot]

Flemish , you might have dropped a bollock offering Taximania a crate of Westvleteren 12 ..
He is Bluemoon"s beer expert who will no doubt take you up on the offer ... I will be 1st sub if he can't make it :)

 

[dronefromsector7G]

What a ****.

 

[FlemishDuck]

Flemish. Your kind simply follow the club not support it.

Ill try to buy up an airliner so i can be in Manchester every week.

Flemish , you might have dropped a bollock offering Taximania a crate of Westvleteren 12 ..
He is Bluemoon"s beer expert who will no doubt take you up on the offer ... I will be 1st sub if he can't make it :)

I'm from Ypres so that brewery is only 10km's away from here, queue's get rather epic though, no way youre going to get faster in line neither.

 

[Tugay One Cup]

The thing is that I see it as a mark of our hospitality that these tourists can get tickets to our games and take up seats for real supporters. Try wearing half and half scarves in Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Naples, Rome, São Paulo, Warsaw or Moscow and see where it gets you. What happens in terms of rivalry in those places goes far and beyond what we call competitiveness. However, I think we have it right and unfortunately the price we pay for that is that we sacrifice space for those loyal to the club, distasteful as it seems.

Personally, I don't mind if we have to take in some clueless half wits who came along because we've now been added to the brochures they flick through when checking what to do in Manchester.

I was at the Ajax game at our ground a couple of seasons ago and I was sat next to some Dutch fans who were being very vocal and openly critical about both our team and English football in general and I just ignored it for as long as I could before telling them to simply "shut the fuck up". They clearly didn't think they were doing anything wrong but acquiesced when they realised I wasn't the only one sick of them talking shit.

They're the same as most tourists (we're fucking awful for it), many are ill mannered, show little respect for house rules and act like everyone else is also on holiday until someone tells them different.

 

[Tugay One Cup]

I like seeing people being butt hurt.

I'd get naked.

You two should be spending Christmas together!

 

[Blue Smarties]

You two should be spending Christmas together!

I did offer. Pulis style.

 

[spud100]

It's my single biggest gripe with City at present, and it's something that's causing me quite a bit of disillusionment with the club in all honesty. So yeah, it's probably something you'll have heard me bang on about before.

We all want to see a successful City, but I'm not happy for it to be at any cost.

We're becoming more and more a corporate whore sellout clone of the scum with every passing year, and it knocks me sick.

We're the frogs placed in a pan of cold water, unable to appreciate the slow temperature change as it's placed over the stove and we slowly boil alive.

Things have been getting worse for us as supporters for several years now, lots of incremental steps which make things shitter for us.

And we're blind to it because all we see is that City are now a footballing powerhouse, or we passively accept it as part of the trade off with no desire to kick up a stink and seem ungrateful for our great fortune in having such investment placed into the club.

But when will we sit up and say it's gone too far?

- The Platinum scheme double your loyalty points for £50.

- Cup Scheme membership necessary to ensure a ticket to a relevant cup final, with loyalty points alone no longer enough.

- The removal of the word 'loyal' from 'loyal points', to be renamed 'ticket points'.

- The vast expansion of corporate seating into once ordinary areas of the ground, and those people being guaranteed a ticket for any away game or cup final, exempt from the now renamed 'ticket points' criteria.

- An annual average increase of a circa 10% in season ticket renewal prices every season.

- Among the most expensive individual league tickets in the Premier League. With the derby in a few months being just short of £60 as a basic starting price for an adult, the new corporate lite areas being much more.

- £35 membership necessary to buy individual league or cup tickets unless they reach open sale, and if they do you have to pay a percentage more on the basic price as a non 'Cityzen'.

- Large swathes of away tickets for the biggest games of the season being siphoned off to brand new supporters clubs, and brand new bandwagon City fans here for the glory - ahead of the longstanding core support.

Not to mention the general sense of the club enacting a kind of professional disassociated distance from the core support, a good example would be Points of Blue being binned; once an opportunity for the support to engage directly with club officials and discuss issues pertinent to the support, only to be replaced by limited, and often clearly loaded, online surveys.

Where does it end? Where and when will it stop? When will we say enough?

I'm not saying this club was perfect 10 years ago, but I don't think there's been a period in City's recent history where the core support has mattered less than it does today.

We supported the club when they needed it the most, but we're dispensable now. I truly believe that. City are sufficiently glamorous enough a club to attract the new generation of shallow needy cunts in the UK and abroad who would've jumped on the rag bandwagon had they been born ten years earlier.

Our loyalty counts for nothing. There are plenty of people with money to spend who are now willing to take our place, some are doing so already by virtue of having a larger disposable income than the rest of us.

This is the single greatest issue we face as supporters at present, and we're doing fuck all about it. We're even policing dissent and criticism among our own supporters about it.

I think in years to come we'll look back at this period as a turning point, where we sat in the pot, and boiled to death.

Our match crowd in 10 years will be totally alien to the one we used to recognise as City in 2011.

Great post pal and 100% agree.

 

[RichardDunneOwnGoal]

@FlemishDuck - The modern bandwagon plastic fan in microcosm.

Genuinely repulsed.

These type of characters getting tickets to our biggest away fixtures of the season as well. Really is quite something.

 

[mcfc1894]

Anyone approached the club on this matter? Disgusts me that these people can get tickets to an away game where supply is minimal and demand high. If they want to go to a game, go to a home one where the die hards already have their tickets and the day to day fans are able to get a ticket as well. They should not be given tickets for away games, not in the away section anyway. Bye bye loyalty point system, good while it lasted. I have over 13500 points and struggle for games now, but I've been lucky enough to go to the 6-1 and other great trips due to the fact I, like many others, put the hours and what ever cash I had spare to follow this club. Now corporates or foreign supporters clubs get tickets for the important games, leaving fans, who've probably not missed an away for 3seasons in the hope they can get in to the top criterias to miss out. Imagine being the next day of sale for arsenal, booked travel, then you find out its sold out. Initially you'd think, fair enough, sold out due to cheaper tickets. But then you watch the game on TV and see pictures of a group of tourists with nearly 200 tickets! You'd be fuming. Has to top now, but it won't unless we, us fans, do something to stop it

 

[malg]

This fine club does not own the club and our players only borrow their shirts that we ever so kindly lend to them.
It will always be the supporters and fanbase that own this club.

Bang on the money.

 

[Tim of the Oak]

I was stood one 'seat' to the left of the group. To me, many of them appeared to be on the autistic scale. I saw some Amish when I was on a tour of the US Capitol Building in Washington DC earlier this year, which they put me in mind of in terms of their social awkwardness. Just an observation.

Not bothered about from whence they came, but to raise your (half and half) scarves in unison is a little bit selfish and inconsiderate imo. I'm there to watch the game (and amuse those around me with my well-observed witticisms) and was prevented from so doing by this display of I don't know what.

Marouane Fellaini turned up with his and half scarf, in the seat in front of me, just before kick off. I saw sweet FA of the game!

 

[RichardDunneOwnGoal]

Great post pal and 100% agree.

Cheers mate.

 

[FlemishDuck]

To me, many of them appeared to be on the autistic scale.

Guilty of that, but it's nice to have a club open to the cognitive deviants.

 

[ped]

@FlemishDuck - The modern bandwagon plastic fan in microcosm.

Genuinely repulsed.

These type of characters getting tickets to our biggest away fixtures of the season as well. Really is quite something.

@FlemishDuck - The modern bandwagon plastic fan in microcosm.

Genuinely repulsed.

These type of characters getting tickets to our biggest away fixtures of the season as well. Really is quite something.[/Q

It's my single biggest gripe with City at present, and it's something that's causing me quite a bit of disillusionment with the club in all honesty. So yeah, it's probably something you'll have heard me bang on about before.

We all want to see a successful City, but I'm not happy for it to be at any cost.

We're becoming more and more a corporate whore sellout clone of the scum with every passing year, and it knocks me sick.

We're the frogs placed in a pan of cold water, unable to appreciate the slow temperature change as it's placed over the stove and we slowly boil alive.

Things have been getting worse for us as supporters for several years now, lots of incremental steps which make things shitter for us.

And we're blind to it because all we see is that City are now a footballing powerhouse, or we passively accept it as part of the trade off with no desire to kick up a stink and seem ungrateful for our great fortune in having such investment placed into the club.
good points ,but can we really blame the club when the second leg of a cup semi is not a given to sell out ,how are we going to pay the peps of this world? it wont be through relying on the core manchester support thats for sure ,
But when will we sit up and say it's gone too far?

- The Platinum scheme double your loyalty points for £50.

- Cup Scheme membership necessary to ensure a ticket to a relevant cup final, with loyalty points alone no longer enough.

- The removal of the word 'loyal' from 'loyal points', to be renamed 'ticket points'.

- The vast expansion of corporate seating into once ordinary areas of the ground, and those people being guaranteed a ticket for any away game or cup final, exempt from the now renamed 'ticket points' criteria.

- An annual average increase of a circa 10% in season ticket renewal prices every season.

- Among the most expensive individual league tickets in the Premier League. With the derby in a few months being just short of £60 as a basic starting price for an adult, the new corporate lite areas being much more.

- £35 membership necessary to buy individual league or cup tickets unless they reach open sale, and if they do you have to pay a percentage more on the basic price as a non 'Cityzen'.

- Large swathes of away tickets for the biggest games of the season being siphoned off to brand new supporters clubs, and brand new bandwagon City fans here for the glory - ahead of the longstanding core support.

Not to mention the general sense of the club enacting a kind of professional disassociated distance from the core support, a good example would be Points of Blue being binned; once an opportunity for the support to engage directly with club officials and discuss issues pertinent to the support, only to be replaced by limited, and often clearly loaded, online surveys.

Where does it end? Where and when will it stop? When will we say enough?

I'm not saying this club was perfect 10 years ago, but I don't think there's been a period in City's recent history where the core support has mattered less than it does today.

We supported the club when they needed it the most, but we're dispensable now. I truly believe that. City are sufficiently glamorous enough a club to attract the new generation of shallow needy cunts in the UK and abroad who would've jumped on the rag bandwagon had they been born ten years earlier.

Our loyalty counts for nothing. There are plenty of people with money to spend who are now willing to take our place, some are doing so already by virtue of having a larger disposable income than the rest of us.

This is the single greatest issue we face as supporters at present, and we're doing fuck all about it. We're even policing dissent and criticism among our own supporters about it.

I think in years to come we'll look back at this period as a turning point, where we sat in the pot, and boiled to death.

Our match crowd in 10 years will be totally alien to the one we used to recognise as City in 2011.

 

[FlemishDuck]

The one moderater asked me ever so nicely not to agitate anyone and the other said i shouldn't be a soft **** so the only thing i can say is like put all youre agression and frustration on me because i'm in some far away spot where you can't hit my premium beerdrinking ass.

God i wish it was it was Saturday already though.

 

[RichardDunneOwnGoal]

The one moderater asked me ever so nicely not to agitate anyone and the other said i shouldn't be a soft **** so the only thing i can say is like put all youre agression and frustration on me because i'm in some far away spot where you can't hit my premium beerdrinking ass. I can handle it.

Mate, you have Aspergers.

The puzzle is solved.

Crack on, and Merry Christmas.