SteV

I think there’s a lot more to it than being about whether players will ‘take a pay cut’. I seem to remember Hayden speaking about it in that (good) lengthy interview he did with some podcast people I’d never heard of before or since. To paraphrase him he said people think it’s just like playing Championship Manager and you can just ship a player out whenever you want, but they don’t realise that players often have young families, so any move (regardless of finances) has to be right for them too. Are they happy to move away from any family/support network? Are they happy to move their kids school etc. Everyone was going mad at Clark not taking a loan move in January. But maybe he didn’t want to spend 5/6 days a week away from his kids (assuming he has some) just to play for a team for 5 months when there was a reasonable chance he might not sign for them anyway.

Looks like they’re still available?

You’re right in that it’s likely to be the only way to get a ticket moving forward, but to less clued-up fans, it’s a lot harder sell to say ‘give us £40 and that’ll give you a chance to pay more money at a later date’, as opposed to a ST where you know exactly what you’re getting (even if considerably more expensive).

Not sure whether they’ll say how many they’ve sold like, so might not get to find out.

Indeed. Be surprised if we’ve sold anywhere near 10k memberships today tbh.

I think West Ham recently did 10% (?) of away tickets as ballots. Not sure how well it worked though? I’ll try and do some digging as to what the issues were.

Let’s not go down the who’s to blame for Mike Ashley route again… We’re all friends again remember ?

I wouldn’t place too much stock in the quoted queue numbers being the number of actual people attempting to buy a membership…

Might be looking a tad far ahead there mate….?

Hasn’t been confirmed either way. General consensus is they are not limited, but some people suggesting otherwise.

It appeared they weren’t particularly until last season….then there seemed to be a definite spike in the uptake (although that was never properly confirmed).

If they’ve replaced the ‘all corporates can buy X number of away tickets for any game’ with a ballot system, that would be excellent, as presumably means more tickets for standard ST holders, and subsequently selling out at lower points thresholds. Big if obviously…

There’s probably not, but that hasn’t been explicitly confirmed, so obviously no-one wants to risk it.

But ST holders can only buy one now as opposed to two, so that’s potentially ~30k less that could have been snapped up previously (obviously nowhere near every ST holder bought an extra 2, but you see the point I’m making)

But, they’ve halved the amount that can go to Members/ST holders. If you look at the Wolves, Leicester and Palace home games last season, they all took a week or longer to sell out completely.

If you’ve got a membership and you can get online the morning that the tickets go on sale for any given game, there’s only going to be 2/3 games where there’s a possibility of having any issue whatsoever of getting a ticket.

Yes, sorry I missed that entirely

If you want to get two tickets, you have to have two memberships

No, now 1 ticket per match, per membership

They haven’t confirmed, but it would seem very unlikely that they limit them

Ah, well no, obviously not if you’re referring to general sale.

There was. We had less than 35k ST holders. After away fans and corporates there was still an absolute minimum of 10k available for each match.

There’ll be between 10k - 15k tickets available per game I would estimate. And I think you’re over-estimating the number of members we’ll get. Plenty of people will talk about it, but when it comes to parting with nearly £40, it’ll be a different story.

Theoretically, that could happen, but I honestly don’t think it will now they’ve cut it to one ticket per match. We’ll see what happens when we play Man Utd and Liverpool, as they’re always the most in demand (unless of friendly neighbours ever get round to sorting themselves out…)