Home Tickets

[Colthekid]

My solution would be pay less upfront to reserve a specific seat and that gives you an exclusive window to buy that seat for each game, at lower than face value obviously. If you don’t it it or if you know you can’t we’ll in advance of the sale window then it goes on open sale, along with other available seats. Solves the problem of games like Monday night when kids can’t go but you don’t need to upgrade from a kid’s ticket if you want to buy that seat as it’s available as a normal seat. From what the club has put out about the North Stand redevelopment, they’re already thinking on similar lines although I think their proposed solutions are a bit too complicated.

Did you (or anyone here) get the survey email from City after fans views of different types of Season Tickets?

They pretty much suggested your idea (I think they called it a "pay as you go season ticket" from memory) among other possibilities. Basically the seat is yours for as many games as you wish and you pay for just those, but the club will sell your seat as a normal ticket for the games you don't attend/want (i.e. they get the monies).

There were other suggestions, including a Big5 season ticket as I recall, but can't remember any others specifically.

Not a bad idea for those, including me, who can't make every game.

 

[wolfie1988]

I’ve said it before but my view is that we should look at season tickets in a totally different way. Like other things we do, the notion of buying a seat at the start of the season worked ok when games kicked off at 3pm on Saturday, apart from the odd midweek game and maybe a game moved for the FA Cup. It was also good for cash flow as you got a large chunk of money up-front when tickets were virtually the sole source of income. You could pay on the gate, stand in the Kippax or sit in unreserved seating.

Nowadays probably 85% of our fans have season tickets and standing/unreserved seating is a thing of the past. Games are all over the place, sometimes at short notice. Boxing Day/New Years Day get buggered about with. We get far more cash from TV and sponsors than from tickets. Time to look at the process of selling seats afresh.

My solution would be pay less upfront to reserve a specific seat and that gives you an exclusive window to buy that seat for each game, at lower than face value obviously. If you don’t buy it or if you know you can’t attend well in advance of the sale window then it goes on open sale, along with other available seats. Solves the problem of games like Monday night when kids can’t go but you don’t need to upgrade from a kid’s ticket if you want to buy that seat as it’s available as a normal seat. From what the club has put out about the North Stand redevelopment, they’re already thinking on similar lines although I think their proposed solutions are a bit too complicated.

We should also be more flexible on pricing. It would have cost you £26 as an Adult member to watch Wolves play at supposedly expensive Arsenal, from a seat equivalent to mine in 109 and that’s regardless of the day of the week.

Some of the ticketing policies are so lazy at our club. No inventiveness at all and certainly no flexibility.

 

[blueparrot]

Some of the ticketing policies are so lazy at our club. No inventiveness at all and certainly no flexibility.

TBF I don't think what pb was suggesting has ever been done, not saying it's a bad idea, but it's a bit of outside the box thinking that may or may not work. It's not so much laziness or even lack of flexibility. It would be completely new way of thinking and would be quite brave.

 

[Deleted member 77198]

It doesn't work because games get moved for tele only six weeks before the game so what good is that to someone who gets a ticket for the Wolves game in August, books to come to Manchester from Friday night to Sunday night and then Sky put the game on a Monday night?

 

[wolfie1988]

TBF I don't think what pb was suggesting has ever been done, not saying it's a bad idea, but it's a bit of outside the box thinking that may or may not work. It's not so much laziness or even lack of flexibility. It would be completely new way of thinking and would be quite brave.

I actually find the whole ticketing side of City too rigid and not very personable. There looks to have been very few attempts to sort the empty seats issue, the family stand extension was ill thought and that's just two off the top of my head

 

[Deleted member 77198]

I’ve said it before but my view is that we should look at season tickets in a totally different way. Like other things we do, the notion of buying a seat at the start of the season worked ok when games kicked off at 3pm on Saturday, apart from the odd midweek game and maybe a game moved for the FA Cup. It was also good for cash flow as you got a large chunk of money up-front when tickets were virtually the sole source of income. You could pay on the gate, stand in the Kippax or sit in unreserved seating.

Nowadays probably 85% of our fans have season tickets and standing/unreserved seating is a thing of the past. Games are all over the place, sometimes at short notice. Boxing Day/New Years Day get buggered about with. We get far more cash from TV and sponsors than from tickets. Time to look at the process of selling seats afresh.

My solution would be pay less upfront to reserve a specific seat and that gives you an exclusive window to buy that seat for each game, at lower than face value obviously. If you don’t buy it or if you know you can’t attend well in advance of the sale window then it goes on open sale, along with other available seats. Solves the problem of games like Monday night when kids can’t go but you don’t need to upgrade from a kid’s ticket if you want to buy that seat as it’s available as a normal seat. From what the club has put out about the North Stand redevelopment, they’re already thinking on similar lines although I think their proposed solutions are a bit too complicated.

We should also be more flexible on pricing. It would have cost you £26 as an Adult member to watch Wolves play at supposedly expensive Arsenal, from a seat equivalent to mine in 109 and that’s regardless of the day of the week.

Very good idea.

It would be an extra thing for me to do every few months that i am not used to and don't really need to do because i am very rarely not there (only missed 5 home games in 15 years in all comps). But if it means the whole system improves i'm up for that change.

 

[pablozabaleta]

I’ve said it before but my view is that we should look at season tickets in a totally different way. Like other things we do, the notion of buying a seat at the start of the season worked ok when games kicked off at 3pm on Saturday, apart from the odd midweek game and maybe a game moved for the FA Cup. It was also good for cash flow as you got a large chunk of money up-front when tickets were virtually the sole source of income. You could pay on the gate, stand in the Kippax or sit in unreserved seating.

Nowadays probably 85% of our fans have season tickets and standing/unreserved seating is a thing of the past. Games are all over the place, sometimes at short notice. Boxing Day/New Years Day get buggered about with. We get far more cash from TV and sponsors than from tickets. Time to look at the process of selling seats afresh.

My solution would be pay less upfront to reserve a specific seat and that gives you an exclusive window to buy that seat for each game, at lower than face value obviously. If you don’t buy it or if you know you can’t attend well in advance of the sale window then it goes on open sale, along with other available seats. Solves the problem of games like Monday night when kids can’t go but you don’t need to upgrade from a kid’s ticket if you want to buy that seat as it’s available as a normal seat. From what the club has put out about the North Stand redevelopment, they’re already thinking on similar lines although I think their proposed solutions are a bit too complicated.

We should also be more flexible on pricing. It would have cost you £26 as an Adult member to watch Wolves play at supposedly expensive Arsenal, from a seat equivalent to mine in 109 and that’s regardless of the day of the week.

Sounds like madness to be honest. Imagine having to keep track of when each premier league game goes on sale so that you can book and reserve your seat. Not to mention that you have to pay every game whereas I'd rather just pay the money upfront at the start of the season and be done with it.

Also what happens when people inevitably reserve a seat and then only come for the big games? Yeah that can technically happen now but I think that if you've paid upfront for 19 home games then you'll turn up for the games against lower opposition rather than city potentially having to shift say 30k seats when people decide they don't want to attend a game against lower opposition.

EDIT: I'm all for a change in the current process, something does need to be done regarding empty seats/season ticket holders not turning up.

 

[Prestwich_Blue]

Did you (or anyone here) get the survey email from City after fans views of different types of Season Tickets?

They pretty much suggested your idea (I think they called it a "pay as you go season ticket" from memory) among other possibilities. Basically the seat is yours for as many games as you wish and you pay for just those, but the club will sell your seat as a normal ticket for the games you don't attend/want (i.e. they get the monies).

There were other suggestions, including a Big5 season ticket as I recall, but can't remember any others specifically.

Not a bad idea for those, including me, who can't make every game.

I didn't get the survey but they presented possible ticket options at the first City Matters meeting. Weekend, midweek, top 6, 18-25 were among the suggestions. PAYG was one and I mentioned my idea but we didn't really discuss it in any detail so I've no idea how the club's proposed scheme would work. But we were supportive of a scheme or schemes that would allow more flexible ticketing.

I'm assuming they would sell the same seat as both a weekend and midweek one but the Wolves game started as a weekend game then was moved to midweek. Who gets the seat?

 

[Deleted member 77198]

I actually find the whole ticketing side of City too rigid and not very personable. There looks to have been very few attempts to sort the empty seats issue, the family stand extension was ill thought and that's just two off the top of my head

The club, still all these years on, do not understand the City fanbase [either that or they don't care!]

I think the club just think the football on the pitch will relate to a full stadium but with our fanbase it hasn't always been like that. We don't always follow a 'common-sense' trend. Our attendances went UP when we got relegated and we averaged 28273 in the third tier in 1998-99 (12th highest in the country when we finished 47th in the country) and we still averaged 39997 when we only scored 10 home goals all season in 2006-07 (6th highest in the country when we scored the least amount of home goals in the country and finished 14th). The poor quality of football on the pitch never particularly made a difference to the numbers of our support and those core supporters are probably all still there (going off all the bald and grey heads in our home and away support).

I also think the club think that all fanbases are the same because many of the board have only ever been around G-14 board rooms with some being part of Barcelona who will have constantly only rubbed shoulders with board members of Real Madrid, Bayern Munchen, United, Arsenal etc. I think our board think that every club must have a load of plastic nobodies in the background who will just flock to the stadium the better we get because that's all they've known. But City have never had that as part of our support, maybe never will do [hopefully not, i'd rather target ex-SeasonCard holders who've dropped away because of price increases than plastic nobodies!] so putting tickets on ticket tout sites or foreign travel angecy sites won't work for us because we don't have a load of foreigners supporting us.

I remember seeing two newspaper reports early this decade that showed the Premier League's richest-poorest fanbases in a league table and in both articles we came second from bottom! (Burnley fans came bottom one year and Wigan fans the next). We don't have plane loads of Irish and Scandinavians flying over or coach loads of out out-of-towners coming to filling up the hotels and the seats not taken up by locals like United and Liverpool (we will have some, but even Burnley and Wigan will have some too).

We are a fanbase that reacts to pricing. So when the club put SeasonCard prices up eleven times in twelve years (£65 one Summer and £75 another Summer; 200% rise since 2011, some areas of the ground went from £750 one season to £1750 in 2015), many long standing fans who never used to miss a game just gave their SeasonCards up instead of paying the higher prices in new corporate areas. This leaves us with different types of people buying SeasonCards (the 2018 version of the rich-poor fanbases saw us lying mid-table) but these slightly richer fans are people who do not turn up every week or we can't shift these SeaonCards in corporate areas because they are never full! Conversely, i believe, 8000 people (could have been more actually, does anyone have a figure?) applied for one of the £299 SeasonCards in South Stand Level 3 in 2015 but there were only a few hundred available.

The club also haven't helped in other ways over the years. They didn't explicitly tell fans who used to be in the North Stand at Maine Road that the "atmosphere stand" at the CoMS would be in the South Stand or that Level 1 at the CoMS was a lot smaller the North Stand at Maine Road. So what ended up happening was that some of the North Stand Maine Road lads ended up in the North Stand at the CoMS and some of the lads who used to be up at the back of the North Stand at Maine Road ended up in South Stand Level 2 because Level 1 doesn't go back as far as Maine Road did which meant all of our singers were split up all around the CoMS and we lost that one big voice of a front man. We've never recovered from that and after also never recovering from losing the standing Kippax in 1994, those two things completely changed our support. Not that the North Stand or the standing Kippax were ever brilliant every week but we had the numbers if we ever needed them.

They also didn't help by kicking everyone out of the North Stand to create the Family Stand that has been full a grand total of 3 times in its whole existence (the three Prem trophy lift days) and not offering some of those displaced fans seats next to people they'd sat next to for years in other parts of the stadium and in some cases not offering SeasonCard holders another SeasonCard seat full stop! And then only for the club to do the same bloody thing again when creating these corporate areas... which, again, are never full!

They also do not help when they hold back tickets that could go to City fans with Loyalty Points and then put them on third party websites for £250+. I think some of us point the finger at fans for that but i think the club do it, just like record companies do with gig tickets! There was a documentary (either BBC Panorama or C4 Dispatches) that went under cover and exposed the record companies doing this and it will be no different with football clubs.

The club need to get to grips with our fanbase. Understand that we are not this giant cash cow of rich supporters or that we have loads of supporters all over the country or surrounding countries who will just keep buying ever increasingly expensive tickets. They need to be harsh on people who do not turn up to games (if you cannot turn up make sure your seat is never empty unless it's an unforeseen circumstance), fans need to make sure their ticket is passed on to a mate (i know it can't always be helped but on the whole it can be) and flush out these continual non-attenders. The club are never going to reduce SeasonCard prices now to entice back fans who've given them up for price reasons over the years but they need to understand that those fans - of whom we have bloody loads (didn't a poster on here once say we've lost over 20000 SeasonCard holders in twenty years?) are well up for buying matchday tickets so make more matchday tickets available and fuck off these third party ticket tout companies and foriegn tour agencies who can't shift the tickets because we don't have the foreign plastic nobodies supporting us and just sell our Manchester City tickets to Manchester City fans. I'm sick to death of seeing posters on this site say they went to buy a ticket for a City game but missed out because it was "SOLD OUT" only to see empty seats at games, must be sickening for those people!

 

[Newtoncc]

It doesn't work because games get moved for tele only six weeks before the game so what good is that to someone who gets a ticket for the Wolves game in August, books to come to Manchester from Friday night to Sunday night and then Sky put the game on a Monday night?

And in this case had Wolves drawn with Liverpool in the FA Cup it would been brought forward to Sunday 12pm from Monday 8pm, how do you plan in advance for that with 6 days notice?