Be Happy People

[WestburyRed]

I know there are many complaints about ticketing (many of them valid, many many more realistically impossible to rectify) but just a few thoughts...

All the teams selling tickets for the play-offs have had problems of some kind, some far worse than ours (the Palace duplicate-ticketing scam being a prime example)

Brighton's tickets went on general sale straight off, no priority to member, season ticket holders or anything.

Again for Brighton, as far as I am aware, if you live away from the town you had to apply by post for tickets! (and yes, I said POST), as tickets were only available from the ground and another location (as the ground didn't accept credit cards)

For City, season ticket holders, members, Grimsby voucher holders, and a few other groups were all classed as priority. Realistically what more could the club have done? Most City fans are fully aware that if they attend regularly but don't have a season ticket, that they won't be a priority, this has virtually always been the case, so surely thats where membership comes in? Its available to all, no questions asked.

The only reasonable complaint I've heard of is the "best first" ticketing, but imagine nearly 34,000 tickets arriving in the mail barely a day or two before they go on sale, I'm sure they were told (by the FA or whoever) that they were organised best first, and theoretically considering segregation and non-fan tickets they were not massively far from the mark.

Finally, all the clubs in the play-offs are obviously Football League clubs, one thing they nearly all have in common is debt. I'm sure if enough resources and money and time (therefore staff, therefore more money) were plunged into the operation, a nearly faultless ticketing process could of been acheived....but realistically it needs to be handled within an extremely tight budget. Considering these debts City have managed to out-source online ticketing to a very high profile ticketing agent (still this is not good enough for many) and called in a call-centre to handle the phone sales.

At the end of the day there is no way City or any club can please everyone in a short space of time. For the fans that attend often but don't hold any membership with the club, although I agree you should be entitled to a ticket over a glory-supporter, what can the club honestly do? Nothing is the truthful answer, and that applies to any club going.

So I just say well done to City for a fairly well organised operation, at the end of the day the majority of general sales have been cleared in barely 10 hours, and I'm willing to bet nearly everyone who wanted a ticket has got one. Short of someone being away between 7am and now today it has been possible to get a ticket.