The Hampshire Gooner
Last week, I got an e-mail from the club offering me two season-tickets for the upcoming season. This was a little surprising, as I was told that I was nearly 12,000th on the waiting-list just a few weeks before receiving the e-mail. I gave the club a call to see what the available options would be, and went through all of the possible seating arrangements - whether the seats would be beside each other and, after not a lot of thought, decided to turn all of the options down.
What is the point in paying out a lot of money in one lump sum where you are buying a product in bulk and not even receiving a discount for doing so? That is what a season-ticket is these days, in my opinion. I used to have a season-ticket at Highbury during the nineties, and I am sure - unless my memory fails me - that the cost of a season-ticket in those days worked out a lot cheaper than buying a single ticket for every home game.
The cheapest on offer to me was £1,158 in the corner of the upper tier near the back of a block, whereas the same seat is only around £33.50 for a CAT C game, £48 for a CAT B game and £81.50 for a CAT A game. The maximum amount of matches you can get for the season ticket is 25 so, if you factor in say 10 B games, 10 C games and five A games, the total cost comes to around £1,220 - if you do get the full quota of 25 matches, which is by no means a certainty. So the absolute maximum value for money you can get from the ST is around £60 off the cost of a single match-day ticket over the entire season. For that to happen, we would have to get some home games in the FA Cup or go all the way in the Champions League (don’t laugh please). Even if we did manage to get a couple of home games in the FA Cup, what sort of team would you be watching for the price of a CAT B ticket?
The only other possible purpose of paying out for a season-ticket would be to guarantee your seat for every home game of the coming season. This would have been well worth while a few years ago, and I would have seen the point of that straight away, but now?
For the last six seasons, I have been nothing other than a humble red member. When we first moved stadium it was hard to get a ticket as a red member for virtually any game. This trend has changed over the past few seasons, to the point where last season it was possible for me to get a ticket to every home game played at our stadium. This includes Man Utd, Spurs and Milan. You get an allocation of around 3,500 for every home league game as a red member, and you also get the chance of buying via the ticket exchange even when a game is officially sold out.
I for one like the flexibility that not having a season-ticket gives me. For example, on the first day of the season I am going to the V Festival, so I wouldn’t be able to attend the Sunderland game, and for the second game of the season my friend who was going to buy one of the season-tickets is away in USA on his hols. If we had bought a season ticket each, we would have had to hope that the match got to the point of being sold out and then tried to sell on our seats at a 10% loss via the ticket exchange.
One thing that stands out for me with the new ticket prices more than any other is the simple fact that sell-outs are more likely now for the smaller games such as Southampton etc. You can get the same seat for around £35 against the likes of the Saints as you would for £85 against United etc. That is a massive difference in price for the same seat and, in my mind, too much of a difference. The smaller games will sell out faster than last season in my opinion, which means that, as a red member, you will get more ticket availability via the ticket exchange than before.
One final point on the season ticket situation - if I was nearly 12,000th in the queue, and got offered two tickets within a few weeks of finding out my lofty position on the waiting list, what has happened to that waiting list? It must have disappeared quicker than an ‘underpaid’ footballer who wants to go elsewhere to ‘win trophies’. Which begs another question - if the waiting list has evaporated as it looks sure it has, what is the big deal about giving up a season-ticket and possibly returning to the back of the queue if the queue in question is now so short?
