"What concerns me more though is the way City have set up this loyalty points 'system' over the last five years or so. If, like me, you are blue member with a couple of thousand points and for various reason have been unable to attend every game so not in possession of a season ticket, clearly you have no chance of ever getting any kind of cup final ticket. I think this is wrong. I also think the way the whole loyalty points system has been set up is wrong and I will be writing to the club about it. ( BTW I have signed up for a season ticket and am on the waiting list ) My understanding is that the club issues loyalty points for what can often be described as extremely dubious reasons, based around the ability to pay. The club tempts fans with the offer of x hundred points for gold and platinum membership based on increasing revenues and ability to pay, not loyalty of support, it seems to me. They also give hundreds of points for merely being a season ticket holder and a variety of other dubious money making methods,
This does not apply to everyone and many blues have been very loyal over many decades.
However, in my case we have a ridiculous situation where my own son, who has had a season ticket for five ish years, has more than double the number of loyalty points that I have and yet I have been to approximately 1000 City matches over more than forty years compared to his 100 matches over 5 or 6 years. How does this happen ? Well ,mainly for the reasons I have already stated where the 'loyalty' points are handed out like confetti a bit like the voting system at the fucking Eurovision song contest. City are wrong over this and the system is totally unjust. It should be based around attending matches, not the ability to pay. In my case I will be writing to the club and demanding to know why I have not been given a good few thousand additional loyalty points for the years I had season tickets at Maine Rd, approximately 20 of them ! No junior should have more loyalty points than those of us who went for many years and had season tickets longbefore they were born.
You covered a lot of 'points' in there and got me thinking, as a blue that had a season ticket at the old stadium, now in the position of getting my young 'blue' up the points ladder.
I got 1200 points for being a season ticket holder at the old stadium (Is that what everyone got???) . In the new stadium I got 100 points for a season ticket in the first year, then bizarrely 420 points for season 05/06. Co-incidentally that was the year my young blue was born, so I've been working on his points since his first match in 2009. Ten points here and there to start with, then 100 (!) for Aris Thessaloniki in 2010/11 and 100 (!) for the Reading Cup Q/F. First season ticket for him was the title winning season (glory hunter). With away matches etc he's already amassed well over 3,000.
Not sure where I'm going with this, except that if a blue has attended 1000 matches surely they should have more than a 'couple of thousand' points. I'm sure there are many blue members out there really peed off that they can't get cup final tickets, but how many matches a season must they currently attend not to make it worthwhile upgrading to a season ticket? Cheapest adult match day ticket this year is £28, average probably around £35-£40, so attending more than about ten would cost similar to the cheapest season ticket. Probably another thread better placed to put this, but after scrambling around in 2011 to get 2 tickets for the semi and final, I was confident just three years later that my eight year old would be well up the queue, and got them this time with over a week to spare.
