Etihad Campus, Stadium and Collar Site Development Thread

I think capacity is far too low. The current obsession with "empty seats" is very damaging. If you go back through City's crowds in the days when Maine Road was huge, you'll see that there were always great fluctuations in attendance. The point was, if you fancied going to a particular match, you could.

Current regular attendance - that is people who go to every home match - is higher than it has ever been. What is lacking is the ability to accommodate the casual spectator.

I say we should not allow ourselves to be dictated to be the snide comments of ignorant supporters of other clubs.


Yep an era when fans didn’t give a toss about Attendances today it’s mainly social/media driven sad fckers who don’t go to games that spout the empty seats shite
 
Once you might have been born in Manchester, move around the City but live here all your life. Now people are more mobile. The connection to the club is different for everyone but what counts is maintaining that. Loyalty.

Someone near me drives up and back from the south in a day, pretty much every home match. 10 hour round journey. I'll never feel a truly loyal fan for as long as he's there to make me feel vaguely ashamed I don't come more.
 
OK, pick a game, I just picked Southampton at random on the planner tickets from £38.50. Now try and find 2 seats together, I only checked a handful of blocks and there were only singles. dotted about.

There were games last season where tickets were still for sale right up to the match, or before the ticket and seat planner was taken down on the OS.

Again Last season. Remaining tickets in every block were priced at the same price on the OS seat planner. £58 springs to mind.

I’m not saying we don’t sell out, but we certainly don’t sell out for every game.

The Geordies are always going on about empty seats. Banter. You’ll hear it in a couple of Weeks time when we play them. I went away to Newcastle last season. There were loads of empty seats. But because the seats are grey you don’t see them, as they blend in with the crowd. That’s one reason why St James Park always looks full, bar the obvious empty seats pitchside.

I had some banter in work this weeks with some rags. Most kept their heads Down. Only 2 didn’t. Their only and predictable come back was empty seats. United fans have nothing else left.
 
Last edited:
Two priorities for the ground:

1) A working Internet connection.

2) PA System (Health and Safety risk). It should be audible all the way around the ground. There are large areas where you can't hear a word even though the volume is really loud.

If you are an O2 customer - The wifi is quite decent.
 
I think capacity is far too low. The current obsession with "empty seats" is very damaging. If you go back through City's crowds in the days when Maine Road was huge, you'll see that there were always great fluctuations in attendance. The point was, if you fancied going to a particular match, you could.

Current regular attendance - that is people who go to every home match - is higher than it has ever been. What is lacking is the ability to accommodate the casual spectator.

I say we should not allow ourselves to be dictated to be the snide comments of ignorant supporters of other clubs.
The loyalty of 30,000 through 30 long years was remarkable. The recent growth isn't. It's entirely normal given the success but we should take advantage of it nevertheless. I am sure that the core of that 30,000 is a legacy in some way or other from the Mercer Allison years or the Book era that followed. In brief we are all glory-hunters but once you pick your club that's it.

Logic tells me that City fans are no different to other football supporters in that respect and yet City seem to have had a higher proportion of true dedicated supporters than any other club. The only comparison I can think of is Sunderland. I noticed that they are getting gates of 25,000 to 30,000 in Division One. (I am hoping they get promotion)

Did the presence of Man Utd filter out the best of humanity towards City? i.e. they got the fair weather fans and we got all the stubborn, awkward sods who would never give up.
 
Our attendances are fine. Building additional capacity means more season tickets can, and will, be sold. The main reason seats are unsold is due to seasoncars holders being unable to attend or available seats being one offs where most attend with another person. You can rarely find two seats together which means the odd seat is available that people turn down. We provide too many corporate seats for 75% of games but that secures the club significant revenue so will not change.

Barca and Real got about 50% capacity for their first home games last weekend. But will sell out for the big games. They don't seem to care. And neither should we. Expanding to over 60,000 would see us get full houses for category A and CL games and 56-57k for other games. But as time goes on our support will grow. We are a bigger attraction than the rags based on how we play and new fans will come and watch us rather than them as time goes on with the current trajectories of both clubs.

There is no point delaying the expansion to build hype and extend the waiting list. The club should crack on and do it and market tickets attractively to secure as much support as possible. It is better to be able to sell more seasoncards as that is where the value is.
 
Marvin.

We could debate this for the rest of the season. But neither of us have the facts, stats and numbers regarding tickets sales.

All I can go off is the OS seat planner and the visible empty seats around the stadium and around me.

I think(know?) we don’t sell out on a regular basis. Mainly against the lesser teams. And even though it’s very good of City to do this, we also give away substantial amounts of free tickets, especially in the LT of the NS, that wouldn’t sell against lesser teams.

If tickets were priced more keenly across the board/stadium, we would sell out regardless of the opposition. Last season’s match against Burnley in the FA Cup proved that. OK, Burnley brought 6000 fans as well.

I except and appreciate City aren’t going to price the big games keenly. They will always sell out. However, for the lesser games the priority should be to fill every seat, bar season ticket no shows.

Adding an additional 6000 seats and selling them is going to stretch the sale and marketing creativity of the club.

And Pep won’t be here then. And it won’t get any better than what we are seeing now. Capacity up, product on the pitch probably down.


I would agree with this statement, there was definity are few dozen young kids from Asia behind the goal, plus when i came in gate B there was 50 American teenagers. They prob arent given away but a reduced rate. I would estimate all those groups (you see mentioned in the programme) is 500~ tickets.

Even more bizarrely i know a couple of coaches from Belfast who round trips to the North West for Kids/youth football teams and they managed to get 35 tickets for United at Home last season!
 

Don't have an account? Register now and see fewer ads!

SIGN UP
Back
Top
  AdBlock Detected
Bluemoon relies on advertising to pay our hosting fees. Please support the site by disabling your ad blocking software to help keep the forum sustainable. Thanks.