spud100
Member
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.