The Brighton game was pretty much sold out a long time in advance, the only tickets becoming available were returns and mostly just single tickets dotted all around the ground, and only becoming available late in the day, so no real opportunity for anybody to buy some together, and to plan travel. Given the demand, I thought the ground would be heaving, full to the rafters. Surprisingly it wasn't, there were probably more than 1,000 empty seats. No big deal, that's less than 2% of capacity left empty, and the club will say that all seats were sold, some of them sold twice, what more can they do. Attached is a photo of the family stand on 21mins taken from CB3, so at that time it should be at peak capacity, pretty much everyone in. Loads of empties in the family stand, and many of them together. I think the competitive pricing in there, only £100 to £140 for a kid's season ticket, means that people can easily choose to only do the big games, and not bother with a resale when not going. Unfortunately for us our bright blue seats really stick out when even a few are empty, and the family stand is in a very visible part of the ground. (compare to when Arsenal were crap, and lots of supporters not showing up, their swathes of dark red empty seats rarely looked as obvious as when we have a small few...maybe i'm grasping at straws!)
I had been watching the available seats on the City website all week, so I was really surprised to also see a few decent clusters of empty sets in the East Stand level 3. These were not for sale on the City website, but secondary sellers seemed to have loads available, at £100 - £120 per ticket in East stand Level 3 (with no discount for kids). My theory is that the resellers buy a batch from the club, heavily discounted, and then sell them at inflated prices to tourists who don't have memberships etc, and need to book flights and hotels so need the certainty of getting a ticket. They resellers don't care if they have clusters unsold, as they have made a profit anyway on the others, and as far as the club are concerned, the ticket is sold..
We are one of the hottest tickets in world football at the moment, kids want to see Haaland, and rightly so. If it were known that there would be hundreds of empty seats available together at the game on Saturday at a reasonable price, they would easily have been occupied, no question, demand is huge, I know the seats are technically already sold, but we all want them occupied.
The club need to reach out the family stand holders who are not regular attendees and let them know the club can sell their tickets easily, if they know well in advance that they won't be there. I know the ticket exchange works, but we really need to push it harder and more proactively. They need to be more ruthless with the resellers, if you have 't sold by certain deadline you need to let the club sell them instead, with enough time to plan travel. We paid £81 for 2 adult and 3 kids ticket, having bought early and got the membership discount, those 5 would have been about £500 to £600 on Livefootball, crazy prices, we want fans getting there, not getting fleeced.
My view is that if you bought your ticket then it's your own choice, (i) to show up or not (ii) to show up at what time you want, (iii) go early for your half time break, (iv) come back late from your half time, and (v) leave on 80 minutes. While it's your choice, it's not fair to say that it's nobody else's business, it affects the atmosphere for the rest of us. We are privileged to have a great team, fantastic stadium and a wonderful manager, but with that privilege should come some responsibly, always try to get your seat filled, maybe try (if possible) to stay and clap the team off. You don't HAVE to do either, but your fellow blues would appreciate it. Keep the faith, we have some small issues to be ironed out to get the sold seats occupied (and maybe a bigger issue to get them filled at the final whistle), but interest in attending our games had rarely been higher.