Like someone else said in another post, people just get out of the habit of going.
City have pushed and pushed and pushed prices up going back to about 2012 and it’s pushed too many local fans away. Especially with individual matchticket prices which were as high as £88 for adults and £48 for children in recent seasons, people have just packed it in. And in those dozen years, City have lost a generation of matchgoing fans across the city. Lose the kids and you lose the future support, and that’s what we’re seeing.
There are enough City fans in the conurbation of Manchester and surrounding areas alone to easily fill a 62,000 stadium if ticket prices had been thought with local fans in mind over the years. But in a decade and a half that started with austerity, stagnated salaries, then ever increasing food and energy prices… football just became a luxury that was a step too far with how much prices kept being pushed up.
Now, so many locals are used to not even looking at getting tickets due to the price rises over the years, and are so used to not going to games, we aren’t even selling out 53,000 but will have a 62,000 ground to fill soon.
The culture of Mancunian City fans of going to the football has been massively diluted. I know nine…ten times the number of City fans who don’t ever go to a game than who do go to any games at all. I know around two-dozen ex-ST holders who either never go to games or now only ever go to the FA Cup early rounds, many because it’s the only games they can afford to bring their kids (we get better FA Cup early round attendances than we do CL group game attendances, so that tells you a great deal!… Newcastle had well over 100,000 fans try and get tickets for their recent game with Barcelona, we barely even scrape half that for CL Group games). How have we got to a situation where we’re in the greatest era in the club’s history yet there’s no big local culture of going to the game across our local support?
The price drops this season haven’t made any difference to it, it’s come too late, the damage was already done and we’ve just lost too much of the local match going culture. We are now massively relying on the tourist attendees… and you can hear it in our diabolical atmospheres over the last few years, it’s flat as a pancake every week now. Even the tourists aren’t coming this season like they were in the previous three seasons or so, as it’s clear where the ticket tout sites have returned chunks of seats back to the club late because they’ve not been able to shift them, you can see them around the ground.
