City Fans Leaving Early/Empty seats

[Deleted member 77198]

I don't think the draw helps with the excitement.

Lyon aren't that exciting, feels like we play Shakhtar all the time, Hoffenheim is nothing special.

Last season the Napoli games were great, the rest not so much.

2016 the Barcelona games were pretty special, even though we were shit in the first one. 2015 was good with Juventus & Sevilla.


I know we complained about groups of death in the past, but I still think the ideal group has 2 big teams battling it out for 1st and then a 3rd team who makes things interesting at least. Otherwise the competition starts in February.

The Group Stage in general is fucking shite. I've never sat in work on a Tuesday or Wednesday in the Autumn excited about the game i'm about to go to, not once!

I've not watched any other game apart from ours and no highlights from the previous two night's games. I do not give a shit at all about how any team has gone on in any other group and, i'll be honest, i don't know the score of the other game in our group from last night and i can't say i care.

For me to care the competition should be a league format from start to finish. The top 8 ranked European leagues' champions qualify, this year that would be:
Barcelona
City
Juventus
Bayern
Paris
Lokomotiv Moscow
Benfica
Shakhtar Donestsk

Every game matters towards the final league table from game 1 in September and when you think it's called the CHAMPIONS (Champions only qualify) LEAGUE (you have to win a league format in your own country to qualify for it and since it's called a league let's make it a league)

or

A knock-out competition from the start. All the teams that qualify qualify now, but they are drawn in a knock-out format with no seeding.

The reason we have the Group Stage is so teams can be seeded and give the same old teams a better chance of getting to the Ro16 and beyond. and it is BOBBINS!

 

[willipp]

I'll be honest and say I was at both the Real Madrid and Liverpool games. As much as the CL doesn't do much for me as a competition, those are games you want to see. Let's be honest, if we were playing Southend in the 3rd round of the FA Cup, you wouldn't expect as big a crowd as we'd get for Arsenal or Chelsea in the QF.

Yes i agree, totally get people not going for a variety of reasons. The one reason i don't get is peoples supposed hatred of uefa and the CL.

 

[Prestwich_Blue]

Anyway the game last night confirmed to me the club need to realize they are going out of their way to attract the wrong fans, there are thousands of local fans who they need to be targeting.

I just don't think, as I said earlier, that there are enough match-going fans who live within a reasonable distance to take up the slack of the ones that don't or can't go. And there certainly aren't enough tourists yet who'll take a couple of days off to attend a midweek game, as they would for the rags.

 

[Marvin]

I just don't think, as I said earlier, that there are enough match-going fans who live within a reasonable distance to take up the slack of the ones that don't or can't go. And there certainly aren't enough tourists yet who'll take a couple of days off to attend a midweek game, as they would for the rags.

There were a lot of locals or what some people call tourists there last night. If there weren't the crowd would have been way below 40,000. I know most of the fans in my row and many hardly any were seasoncard holders. If it was a league fixture there would have been well over 60,000 at the ground last night. In my opinion there was way less than 1 in 2 seasoncard holders there last night. Obviously City will know, and you'll probably find out later.

Utd fans are forced to buy Champions League tickets.

If that was a weekend FA Cup game, crowd would have been huge because there were a lot of none-seasoncard holders there. Not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing.

What it suggests is that our supporter base is changing but I guess we knew that anyway - that's if I read it right as to who attended

 

[AshtonBlueMooner]

Charge £20 adults and £5 kids and you've got a sell out and much better atmosphere. Simple.

I was there last night in a group of 5 and atmosphere was poor before, during and after game, flat as a pancake. We've become very spoilt.

 

[PepInYourStep]

Made the mistake of visiting Twitter within half an hour of full time. It's amazing how many fans of 'bigger' clubs have an obsession with our attendances and see empty seats as a sign City will never be as big as their club. These will be the same people who confuse our loyal and proud fan base with an notional claim we have the largest one.

So while we were useless on the pitch 20 years ago, we were brilliant off it - something these fans of 'bigger' clubs will never likely experience, certainly not accept. Perhaps in 20 more years our fan base and 'history' may well appear more like their own and maybe we'll give more of a damn about playing the Lyon's of this world because we are better than and bored of beating the teams we are constantly reminded have more fans than us.....

The obsession with attendances only started recently, mostly from bitter rags upset that we're now competing on an equal footing. Fans of other clubs have latched on to it like lemmings.

To put it into perspective, the Nou Camp was only 72% full for their game against PSV. Real Madrid had only around 50% for their first La Liga match this season. And anyone with any sense knows the rag lies about "old trafford is always full" are utter bollocks

 

[balotellishaircut]

i can't go because I work nights, but why doesn't the ticket office stay open and sell tickets till 8pm, so if people decide they want to go last minute they can, reckon they would shift loads this way.

 

[Marvin]

Charge £20 adults and £5 kids and you've got a sell out and much better atmosphere. Simple.

I was there last night in a group of 5 and atmosphere was poor before, during and after game, flat as a pancake. We've become very spoilt.

You realise you could have bought 3 tickets for £52.50. The crowd was as big as it was precisely because so many none seasoncard holders turned up but it was boycotted by seasoncard holders. Kids seats were something like £7.50 if I remember rightly. City did what you wanted but it made no difference. It could have been the other way around that it was just seasoncard holders who turned up but I remember looking in at the ticket planner before the Fulham game and the take up was tiny.

In my block which is 100% seasoncard holder less than a 1/2 tickets had gone and there was a big surge of ticket sales on Monday and Tuesday but not enough to cover the shortfall.

 

[Paulmcfc2703]

Yes totally agree. However, if people claim to be not interested in the CL, then it shouldn't matter if its Lyon in the group stages or a SF against Madrid. We all know thats bollocks though, majority of those people will be there at the Semi despite their hatred of the competition.

I’m afraid that won’t be the case for me. If anything having experienced a CL Semi I know that I won’t be missing anything if we made it this year.

 

[Marvin]

i can't go because I work nights, but why doesn't the ticket office stay open and sell tickets till 8pm, so if people decide they want to go last minute they can, reckon they would shift loads this way.

It's open 24 hours (online) however there looked like there were some admin problems. I doubt that was significant.

City should be pleased that we have so many new supporters. This is not me guessing. I know from looking at the ticket sales online that that was what was happening. And if you read the annual report you will find that City had 125,000 unique fans in the home areas last season (almost certainly the bulk from Cup games). On the debit side a lot of seasoncard holders don't go unless its a weekend.