The minutes for the first meeting are up on the club website (although I can only see them on my phone and not on my computer at the moment). The club were told it wasn't acceptable for these to be delayed so long so we've agreed that the minutes of meetings will in future be online by the Friday of the week following the meeting. As we had a meeting last night, the next set should be up by close of play next Friday.
The main subjects discussed were ticket points & the North Stadium redevelopment. The latter's been discussed at length and the Focus Groups & email surveys have been done so there's nothing to be gained in talking about that here. We had a wide-ranging discussions on ticket points and presented a number of options to the club. There were a number of areas we felt needed to be addressed:
- People buying tickets for the points then passing them on, meaning it wasn't a fair process. The club said the average selling out level was around 12.5k points but a few games had gone much lower.
- Because of the above, we felt that 18-25 year-olds were among the worst group affected as they had little chance to catch up those on higher points.
- We felt the points system still had some merit but we needed to look at how it could be amended as the current system just encouraged abuses.
- We weren't in favour of a general ballot as there were a number of disadvantages to that system.
- We also questioned the Platinum scheme, on the grounds that it was divisive and a very cheap way to accumulate extra points and was part of the problem of people buying tickets they don't intend to use. We asked for it to be discontinued.
- We talked about European aways and how people booking the official Thomas Cook package weren't always sure they'd get tickets., causing problems and unneccesary expense later down the line if they didn't get a ticket. Our view was that anyone applying for the TC travel package should get a ticket on a first-come, first-served basis regardless of points.
The club gave us some data which people may well find interesting:
- The breakdown of away tickets (assuming a 3000 allocation) is as follows: 60% go to points holders via normal sale, 20% to OSC's, 15% to Hospitality & 5% internal
- There are just under 5000 seasoncard holders in the 18-25 age range
- There are 27,000 Gold & 13,000 Platinum seasoncard holders
The actions we asked the club to consider were:
- Abolish points for away games, meaning there was less incentive to buy away tickets.
- Introduce a random ID check for a subset of fans who had bought away tickets to ensure they were the ones using them.
- Introduce a ballot involving a limited number of away tickets for 18-25 year olds.
- Make some adjustments to the points system to flatten it out while still ensuring that the people at the top who were regular away-game attendees weren't disadvantaged.
Thoughts?
Edit: here's a link that should work
https://www.mancity.com/fans-and-community/club/city-matters/meetings-and-actions