Uwe's Stinky Trainers
Member
- Joined
- 8 Nov 2012
- Messages
- 17
I've registered purely to respond to this. I feel I've read enough berating of our support in recent days for it to be warranted.
Granted, the atmosphere on Tuesday was a little shortcoming. I sat beside the Ajax fans and a culmination of two factors resulted in the atmosphere being that way.
1) The drum.
2) The first goal which came against the run of play despite out inability to break the opposition down. The shock of another then killed what little hope was there off completely.
Moving on to the attendance figures.
Uefa capacity states that a maximum of 45,500 people can attend games at the Etihad.
Official attendance 40,222
Ajax allocation, at best, only 65-70% subscribed. Which, in that area of the ground would mean that they attributed to 1200 or so empty seats.
I make that out at roughly 90% of our allocation being filled. And from where I was sat, the bulk of vacant seats were in the hospitality section.
For a club based in Manchester, who up until recently have always played second fiddle to our bloated neighbours, those statistics don't read all that unpleasantly. Champions League football is an international brand, and as such we are not recognised as major players by the intended demographic. That market share is held by United. You would usually expect at least 5-6% of seats to be occupied by floating demographic of football fans.
Allow some slide for those regular attendees who, on Tuesday, decided that they would rather put the £35 to other uses on the grounds that we have performed so abysmally in both our Champions League campaigns thus far.
Granted, the atmosphere on Tuesday was a little shortcoming. I sat beside the Ajax fans and a culmination of two factors resulted in the atmosphere being that way.
1) The drum.
2) The first goal which came against the run of play despite out inability to break the opposition down. The shock of another then killed what little hope was there off completely.
Moving on to the attendance figures.
Uefa capacity states that a maximum of 45,500 people can attend games at the Etihad.
Official attendance 40,222
Ajax allocation, at best, only 65-70% subscribed. Which, in that area of the ground would mean that they attributed to 1200 or so empty seats.
I make that out at roughly 90% of our allocation being filled. And from where I was sat, the bulk of vacant seats were in the hospitality section.
For a club based in Manchester, who up until recently have always played second fiddle to our bloated neighbours, those statistics don't read all that unpleasantly. Champions League football is an international brand, and as such we are not recognised as major players by the intended demographic. That market share is held by United. You would usually expect at least 5-6% of seats to be occupied by floating demographic of football fans.
Allow some slide for those regular attendees who, on Tuesday, decided that they would rather put the £35 to other uses on the grounds that we have performed so abysmally in both our Champions League campaigns thus far.