Simon Lloyd
The recent ballot for FA cup final tickets has inevitably resulted in disappointment for many fans. Whilst I accept that there is no easy way to decide who gets a ticket, and who doesn’t, the method adopted by the club this year seems particularly haphazard in it’s approach. The idea of a random ballot appears to be a fair way of deciding who gets lucky, and who misses out, and those who got lucky will no doubt sing it’s praises. There is however a major problem with this system, and that is the desire for a group of people to go to the match together.
This desire was recognised by the club when they allowed a group application for the ticket ballot, and many people would assume that if you apply as a group you will either be accepted, or rejected, as a group. This however was not the case, and if you read the application process through to the end, as I did yesterday, it clearly states that each member will be treated individually when the ballot is held, and people in group applications may well end up with a different status. This was the case concerning my own group application, and from reading the social media, many others as well.
I go to games with the same group of friends every week, and we sit next to each other in the ground. We went to the semi-final together, and wanted to attend the final together, so we put in a group application. On checking the status of our application I found that only I had been successful, and the others had missed out completely. I really want to be there when Arsenal finally lift a trophy again, but I have no desire to do so without the people I regularly attend matches with. I would rather have missed out than be the only one with a ticket, and talking with the others it would have been a case of all of us or none of us.
If the group had missed out we would have been disappointed, but accepted the fact that we were unlucky in the ballot. Our missing out may have meant that another group could have gone and enjoyed the match in the same way we would have done, together. I know some people will attend matches alone, and are happy to do so, but a vast majority go with at least one other person.
I assume that the ballot picked as many members as there were tickets available, and then a few reserves for those who did not buy a ticket. Would it have been unreasonable to have accepted group applications as one, and linked them together in the ballot? Then if the lead applicant was chosen the ticket count reduced by the amount of people in the group. Obviously a limit of the size of group application would have been required, but it would have been a simple task for modern technology to cope with.
Any ticket allocation method has it’s flaws, but the random ballot is the most unfriendly way of doing so. Football is a shared experience, and a random ballot does not consider this vitally important aspect. I think it’s a shame that the club chose to overlook this when deciding on the allocation method.
If I decide to go on my own, I will undoubtedly sit with thousands of other Arsenal fans, but I will be alone. I may have a brief chat with the people around me, but all the things that make my match day experience will be absent. Because of this I will probably pass up the chance of a ticket, and meet my mates in a pub where we can enjoy the game together.
