The worst I seen was Arsenal in the charity shield at Wembley in the top tier. My god it was woeful you wanna see the state of it. The lad in front of us trying singing a few songs even NQ disco pants and a few oldies. The only heads I spotted was Pete the badge outside and Eddie Sparrow who does the city deceased page. .Funny observation at Chelsea. Saw a family of 5 tourists outside the ground, 4 wearing City shirts and one a Chelsea top. With this combination of shirts I was pondering which end they had tickets for. Subsequently saw them come out of the club shop all wearing Chelsea tops, so guess they had tickets for home end!
At West Ham, there was a family of 6 all in City tops. Pre game they were joyously taking lots of photos. However, throughout the first half the 2 females looked disinterested and remained sat down for the whole half (or more accurately 40 minutes as they left early before half time). In contrast, the dad actively enjoyed the game. I wonder how they managed to get 6 tickets together?
When I was a kid we alternated between football and soccer when talking about it. If you watched the MOTD 60 programme the other week one of the pundits/commentators was calling it soccer.at least I’m calling it football! I’ll add this to my list (pitch, defence, kit).
The thing that irritates me most is the dishonesty of the club about how tickets are distributed. City seem to think that people are stupid, or can’t notice the differing ‘tourist ratio’ at different games. London matches, there are loads, likewise Utd, and Liverpool, Newcastle or other games in the north, not so many. Which means that the club are varying the quota for touting (that is what it is) by demand, which is just wrong. If they had the honesty to say 10% or 15% of every away allocation will be sold to touting agencies at a premium, then we would at least know.I don’t think any rational person is going to have a problem with the actual tourists themselves. Unless they’re acting like dicks obviously.
I don’t even think many people have a huge problem with the club giving a smallish percentage of tickets for home games to tourists, to help grow the all important ‘global brand’
It’s when the club take a chunk of tickets out of the most in demand away allocations and they directly or indirectly end up in the hands of tourists, often with no affinity to the club whatsoever, that the majority of people get a bit peeved.
It doesn’t seem to make much sense, even purely from a business sense, apart from anything else.
They are also games that the sponsors and friends and family of players / management are likely to take up their tickets for.The thing that irritates me most is the dishonesty of the club about how tickets are distributed. City seem to think that people are stupid, or can’t notice the differing ‘tourist ratio’ at different games. London matches, there are loads, likewise Utd, and Liverpool, Newcastle or other games in the north, not so many. Which means that the club are varying the quota for touting (that is what it is) by demand, which is just wrong. If they had the honesty to say 10% or 15% of every away allocation will be sold to touting agencies at a premium, then we would at least know.
Which is fine, but let's have some transparency.They are also games that the sponsors and friends and family of players / management are likely to take up their tickets for.
Champions League matches would sell out quickly to long term Blues if tickets were heavily discounted. It’s no coincidence that Hamburg Home was an absolute legendary evening.
Stagger sales with loyalty points and you’d see a different crowd. Not going to happen though, is it?