Some interesting stats in here, though no actual numbers…
But it does seem like a lot more people are getting tickets for home games through general and resale than through the ballot (which ties with anecdotal evidence)
And the number of ID checks being failed suggests they’re actually doing a pretty good job of avoiding false positives?!
by GrumpyOldFart74
7 Comments
Never seen anyone getting id checked at a home game and loads of tickets get sold on outside sites.
It’s good to see these sorts of stats. anecdotally there have been a lot of general sale tickets coming available recently, in the days leading up to games, I presume the number of fixtures and the cold weather will encourage a few more ticket returns in January…
Struggling a bit with the away ticketing stats. What’s the “% of ID checks that didn’t go to box office” about? And, if circa 10% of away tickets didn’t go to season ticket holders, who is/how are people getting them? I thought you had to be a season ticket holder to get an away ticket… unless that’s just transfers to non-ST holders?
So based on some quick maths, there are 52000 seats in the stadium. 35000 are season tickets, 3000 are away fans leaving 14,000 tickets to sell per game.
If the average ballot entering success rate is 25% that means there are 56,000 people in the ballot who want a ticket. So the new stadium should have a capacity of (35,000 + 3,000 + 56,000) 94,000.
The lower rate (e.g. 39% for Fulham) is 74,000 and the upper rate (e.g. 18% for Man City) is 115,000.
This ignores the general population who don’t even bother with membership but would buy a ticket if it was possible to do casually and also the people who might buy multiple tickets for friends and families and then the tourist fan who wants to attend a random match while they’re visiting the city.
There’s an argument for not building the biggest stadium possible to maintain demand but when the least in demand home game of the season has at least 74,000 customers paying just to get a ticket surely that’s the benchmark?
If we were to air on the side of generosity and say that there are 20,000 tickets available in the ballot each time (taking into account season tickets being handed back for games, hospitality seats and varying away allocations) then that would mean that there are ~83,000 people entering each ballot on average – which seems a very low amount in my opinion
Furthermore the data seems to suggest a rather significant percentage of people are entering the ballot, winning the ballot and then never actually buying a ticket – and that this is happening consistently with every single match. That again seems very strange to me.
It makes me think that – rather like when they tried to claim that there was a 1 in 3 success rate for ballots previously – the club have fiddled the numbers a tad here to make the system look better.
> We currently have over 35,000 season ticket holders. This equates to approximately 70% of home fans at a typical Premier League match at St. James’ Park.
And yet it’s the “day trippers” and “tourists” that are blamed for the increasingly poor atmosphere at SJP…
I’ve entered almost every single ballot and haven’t had a single success.
I’ve only been to games this season by: winning them from a sela competition, resale, and mates with tickets not going.
Oh but I did get a chance to buy £90 reissues of retro kits, £50 on membership well spent
There was demand for more transparency and some specific data points. The club have answered here, actually revealing a lot more than I expected.
They are not going to reveal the numbers of members, as this is commercially sensitive.
Roughly speaking, for an adult member, you seem to have a 1 in 9 / 1 in 10 chance of success in the ballot. So probably would expect two ballot wins per season on average, if you applied for every single game. General sale is pretty easy to get tickets in usually, so I’m not too concerned if we fail at the ballot these days.