I'll tell you what's going on. I've posted this before but people don't seem to understand.
When I was making my way round to my entrance, just past City Square, by the entrance to the Family Stand, there was a large group of kids with Kemnay FC on their tracksuits. They're a club from NE Scotland and presumably they'd come down for the game or were there as part of some sort of football tour. The adult helpers were giving out tickets and those would have been in Family Stand Level 1. We've given them those tickets as we do for many other groups, who you often see before or during matches. So if Kemnay FC have asked for tickets and we've sent them 30, that's 30 that can't be sold to someone else. If only 20 of them turn up, there's going to be 10 empty seats. There will have been other groups in that stand, maybe some of them Leicester fans at Uni or smething.
We also reserve that area (FS1) for CFA players, staff and their families. As far as I know, we just leave a load of tickets there and people are free to use them or not. But they can't be sold to anyone else so if we give 100 tickets to the CFA and only 50 are used, that's 50 empty seats. We also give tickets to places like Manchester University. We'll send them, say, 100 tickets and that's another 100 that can't be sold to other people. If they only sell 40, that's another 60 empty seats.
We do that for two reasons - the first is we want to encourage new fans, which is entirely laudable. One of the most fanatical fans I know among my friends wasn't even a football fan until he came to university up here. He lived near Maine Road and saw people going to the game on a Saturday and followed them, getting hooked in the process. The other reason is that there aren't enough paying fans to buy those tickets at the prices being charged. I think they were asking £51 for an adult ticket in EL1/3 at the Leicester game so that's something like £160 for mum, dad and two kids. That's far too much in my view.
The other major gaps are in the Joe's/93:20 areas, where there are regularly swathes of empty seats.
Cheaper prices would encourage more people to buy tickets, rather than encourage more people not to attend. That would mean we'd have less I've posted before about how I'd re-jig season tickets, charging a smaller up-front price but with people paying for individual games. Then, instead of sending physical tickets to the CFA & external groups like uni's, I'd do it electronically so we always know how many tickets we have and can sell them if people want them, rather than saying we're sold out yet have blocks of empty seats.
