Priced out?

Yep, doesn’t matter who anyone supports when it comes to this. Fans have to take a stand and do it together as one before it’s too late.

English football is going to implode soon. It’ll be like Serie A from the late 90s and 00s where ticket prices went through the roof and fans just stopped going.

Juventus used to get about 25,000 in their old Stadio Delle Alpi which held 70,000. There was a Turin derby in that stadium that had an attendance of just 19,000 in 2003… and Juve got to the CL final that season. That stadium was only built in 1990 and ended up being knocked down in 2009. It was newer than the Etihad is now when it was demolished.

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Even the two best supported clubs: Inter and Milan; struggled with 36,000ish average attendances in their 80,000 San Siro at times in the mid 2010s.

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Roma v Sampdoria in 2014:
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Clubs priced out their fans, fans stopped going, huge stadiums were empty, TV companies stopped buying their TV rights and the clubs were skint. Only 2 Italian teams have won the CL since 2003, and none in the last 14 years.

It’s slowly starting to get better in Serie A now. The Milan clubs are back getting 72,000 average attendances. It’s probably the second best quality league in Europe behind the PL now. But it had two decades where it ate itself and was in a terrible mess for what was once the greatest league in the world that everyone wanted to watch.

Yet even now they are showing they haven’t learnt their lesson: look at the attendance between Milan and Liverpool earlier this season in the CL: 58,000, 22,000 empty seats when their Serie A attendances are over 70,000… all because they tried to cash-in. Tickets were said to start at €125 for home fans. That’s half a season ticket in the Bundesliga, just for one CL game.
The Italian economy never recovered from the 1992 foreign exchange crisis, it was pretty cheap there in the late 1990s for football, getting 3000 lira to £ when it was 2000 at the start of the decade. Fans stopped going as they were skint and jobless, but you could pick up a ticket for a top game in the late 1990s for £15 on the day, about the same as City in the north stand for a lower league game at the time. Some games were free for women, and all the prices of all the games were listed in La Gazzetta dello Sport.

The grounds built for the 1990 world cup were poorly constructed and not made to last, nor based on expected attendances for the clubs. The PL killed off Serie A by paying better wages, the tipping point being around 1996.
 
Had a big debate about this with two members of the red cartel. It started with the empty seats jibe. I normally look at them in bemusement. Because I go and they don’t.
Which his always my reply. On this occasion, I reminded both idiots that fans of all clubs are currently protesting about prices, so maybe they should look at it from that view point.
That some City fans take action and refuse to pay. Both started laughing and claimed it doesn’t matter for them, because they’ll alway have fans to fill the empty seats.
I just looked them in the face and told them they’re a pair of clowns, because that’s precisely the problem. While idiotic day trippers keep paying these prices. We’ll have this issue for years.

One rag fan who does go, told the pair of them to listen at what’s being said. Because he’s one of those fans who will be walking away from it soon because he’s being priced out

On I side note. Not having tourist on Tuesday night was quite refreshing and will have hopefully got some board members discussing prices
Armchair fans who don’t go to matches don’t have a clue what match-going fans have to put up with regarding pricing. For them to say it doesn’t matter at United as there will always be enough fans to fill the seats is an insult to those United fans who do go and fork out a lot of money for the privilege.
 
Coming from Ireland can be a pain if the rags are home on the same week. Sometimes a trip can be as little as 120 other times 3-400
 

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