Sorry to hear about the hassle many have been through today.
As some of you may know, City Matters worked with the Club after the Real Madrid debacle in 2023 to improve match day criteria - explicitly rewarding prior attendance. That's worked relatively well on occasion, such as Madrid last season, but we still believe that the criteria should be organised around ticket points and that for Premier League games in particular it should be tighter.
The Club's view is that they want to ensure that those who purchase a membership are not locked out from buying tickets. So the current approach helps to sell memberships. It also creates a higher demand on days like today, which is probably good from a marketing perspective. Likewise, sales in advance does provide relative financial certainty from their perspective (although I don't think we would have to worry about ticket sales if we priced match day tickets accordingly, but I digress). But my primary concern is that it creates a poor experience for supporters and does not adequately reward prior attendance.
Believe it or not, yesterday and today could have been worse. The initial plans were to use three games as the criteria for the United, Liverpool and Arsenal matches. We managed to get this changed back to five games. The Club also intended for the final home game of the season to be sold to those who purchased membership at any time, but they changed this to before the fixtures were announced.
Whilst I am evidently pleased with those changes we achieved, it's also plainly obvious that they do not go far enough. It gives more evidence to my views outlined in the second paragraph, although I think the case was already compelling in that regard.
As one slither of silver lining, the Club have agreed that any tickets returned by an away team will be capped at £30. This makes sense given that the Club will have accounted for a £30 sale in their business plan. So, there is likely to be a number of matches with (relatively) cheaper tickets on sale at short notice.
Another element to this is All Games on Sale, which I don't particularly support given the financial outlay required and the free for all it creates. That said, the Club have agreed to bring in a sales window three weeks out from each game (in part, I think, due to the Flexi Gold sales). I am still waiting for clarity on the numbers that will be available in isolation from Flexi Gold, but I will be pushing that there is robust ticket point criteria in place.