If Manchester City’s ticketing policy over recent years can be summed up in one match, it would be the Community Shield against Arsenal at Wembley in August.
After the Football Association had angered supporters by scheduling the game’s kick-off for 5:30pm on a Sunday, leaving many spectators living outside London unable to travel home by public transport afterwards, City fans staged a boycott that saw more than 500 people donate a total of £15,000 ($19,000) to the Manchester Central Foodbank rather than purchase a ticket for the match.
That showed a growing appetite among the fanbase to push back against decisions that directly affect them, although City still sold all of their 33,000 tickets, showing the club’s executives that other fans were ready to fill the places of those who stayed away.
There was one important difference, though: even Pep Guardiola’s players noticed a subdued atmosphere in the City section that afternoon. Their goalscorer Cole Palmer thought something was amiss when the celebrations of him making it 1-0 with 13 minutes of the 90 to play were not as enthusiastic as normal. Team-mate Ruben Dias was also left bemused when he came off the pitch.
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Last week, after City announced an average season-ticket price rise of five per cent — with some going up by as much as 11 per cent — those issues were thrown into focus again.
During conversations between The Athletic and supporters’ groups, complaints about the club’s ticket costs have crossed over into other concerns, including:
- Limited impact of fan feedback at the club
- Increased ticket prices and controversial sales criteria for matches
- Flat atmospheres at the Etihad Stadium
- A boycott of the official ticket resale platform
- Concerns about the new ‘flexi-gold’ season-ticket initiative
- Increase to a minimum-attendance clause on season tickets
All four main City fan groups — the official supporters’ club, the 1894 Group, MCFC Fans Foodbank Support (FFS) and City Matters, the club’s fan-engagement programme — voiced their opposition to the increases. On Friday afternoon, the 1894 Group and MCFC FFS also called for supporters to boycott City’s official ticket exchange platform.
This all came as dates for City’s Premier League matches in April were ‘confirmed’, although they could still be changed at 10 days’ notice, depending on the team’s Champions League fortunes.
Justifying the decision to increase the cost of season tickets, City pointed out they offer them starting at £120 for under-18s, enabling younger fans easier access to matches.
The increase in prices is put down to rising operating costs connected to inflation and City say that, on average, the price increases amount to £2.30 per match for adult season-ticket holders, and under £1 for juniors.
That is a price that most fans are prepared to pay, begrudgingly or otherwise, with many believing that the quality of football on show — and with City winning three Premier League titles in a row, and a treble of trophies domestically and in Europe last season — justifies the rise.
Fans in the United States have also been left bemused, having become accustomed to paying far greater sums for sporting events at home.
This season’s cheapest adult season ticket at City, listed on the official website, is £385, with the most expensive non-hospitality ticket being £1,030.
However, the impact for many in Manchester is different, with some supporters pointing to how season-ticket costs have risen consistently across a decade, with price increases in different areas of the stadium ranging from 16-24 per cent in total. The raises have also come after City announced record profits of £80.4million in their most recent accounts.
“In a vacuum, most people could probably take a rise of £30, £40, £50 on the chin, but it’s the context of the past 10 to 15 years,” Alex Howell, chair of the City Matters group, tells The Athletic. “It’s a good chunk of money when the cost of living crisis is impacting people. Manchester is the sixth most deprived local authority in the country.”
How City season ticket prices have risen
| Season | PRICE |
|---|---|
|
2016-17 |
£750 |
|
2017-18 |
£770 |
|
2018-19 |
£795 |
|
2019-20 |
£820 |
|
2020-21 |
N/A* |
|
2021-22 |
£820 |
|
2022-23 |
£845 |
|
2023-24 |
£880 |
|
2024-25 |
£915 |
Prices are for a single adult season ticket in the East Stand’s lower tier.
* Games were played without fans in attendance due to the Covid-19 pandemic
It is a common view among the fanbase that, with those record profits in mind, City could have frozen ticket prices, because the impact on supporters far outweighs the impact on the club.
A spokesperson for the 1894 Group says: “They’re making a huge profit and this would have been an easy win to keep fans onside.
“Pep said it in interviews last season, there were times when the fans really dragged the team across the line, like the Real Madrid game in the Champions League. If they actually think that, things have to go both ways.”
Some estimates suggest that even if every season ticket went up by £50, the club would stand to generate just under £2million in extra income, which represents about 0.25 per cent of total revenues and is deemed, by some fans, insignificant compared to the goodwill that freezing prices would generate.
In the boardroom, where executives are charged with growing revenues, that kind of increase would be welcomed, and the reality behind City’s decision is that they are running a business here.
It has been communicated to fans during meetings in recent weeks that City want to catch up with the Premier League’s other ‘Big Six’ clubs — Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea. Despite income from prize money and sponsorships soaring, City still make less money from matchdays than those teams. That is likely to be the case for some time yet, given the three London clubs can charge far greater sums due to the economics of living in the capital. As for United and Liverpool, they have massive global fanbases City cannot yet rival.
To put the business viewpoint in the sharpest focus, one senior City executive told fans at a recent meeting that prices had to go up so supporters would not feel that their season tickets were becoming devalued. It is logic that might make sense in boardrooms but not so much in the stands.
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The other reality of the situation is that many other Premier League clubs have announced price increases for next season, knowing that most fans will pay if they have the money. Those who can’t afford to go to City matches anymore, or attempt to make a stand for better conditions, as demonstrated at the Community Shield last summer, will be replaced by those who can.
The 1894 Group encourages fans to renew their season tickets as long as they can afford to. Its members believe bigger issues are at play, primarily that the number of Etihad season tickets is gradually being reduced, with no new ones being made available since fans returned to stadiums in 2021 following the behind-closed-doors football of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We’re being slowly replaced,” Dante Friend, of the 1894 Group, said last week on the MCFC 9320 Pubcast YouTube show. “The only way City can beat Arsenal for matchday revenue is if there are no season tickets at all — 60,000 people paying £70 or £80 per ticket per game. That’s what some people at the top of the club want.”
The Etihad is regularly sold out but some fans are angry at their treatment (Naomi Baker/Getty Images)
City say the introduction of a new ‘flexi-gold’ ticket, which allows supporters to opt in to every match rather than opt out, will be made available to existing official members, thus increasing the season-ticket allocation for next season.
An 1894 spokesman told The Athletic: “If you can afford it, renew your season ticket, and for the games you can’t make, sell it to friends and family for face value.
“We are not convinced City are going to release any more season tickets — they’re trying to minimise the number of season-card holders and get matchday tickets sold at a higher mark-up. If fans can renew, they should, and sell the tickets at a lower price than what the club would otherwise charge.”
This ties into an issue with City’s official ticket resale platform, which allows fans who cannot attend a match to transfer their seat to somebody else. In return, a fan gets one-nineteenth of their total season-ticket cost back (the season ticket amounts to 19 home Premier League matches). The club can then sell that seat individually at a higher price.
A week on from the decision to increase prices, there is also annoyance among supporters that City are yet to explain their decision, or engage in further conversation about it.
The Blue Moon Podcast, a prominent City-related show, submitted several questions to the club last week, but they declined comment, as has been the case in previous years. “It shows that they know the season-card price rises are unjustifiable,” a spokesperson from MCFC FFS says. “There is no argument that makes sense of these, except for greed.”
Howell, who chairs regular meetings between the club and City Matters, says the group have made headway on certain issues, including ticketing criteria for the home leg against Real Madrid in the Champions League quarter-finals on April 17.
Last season, when the two clubs met in the semi-finals, City angered supporters by making tickets available to people who signed up for official memberships on the same day, meaning that supporters who may have attended every Champions League game that season, and in previous years, had only the same chance of securing a ticket as those with no prior connection to the club.
Following that, City Matters pushed for prior attendance to be rewarded and, to buy a ticket to the Madrid game in a few weeks, members will need to have attended at least two European matches this season.
Manchester City’s fanbase continues to expand (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
Additionally, season-ticket holders have to attend a minimum of 10 matches per season or their ticket will be unavailable for renewal. City carry out due diligence on supporters who have attended fewer than 10 matches, making allowances for illness and/or disability, and very few season tickets get revoked. However, those that are taken away are not made available as season tickets to other supporters on a waiting list, instead being sold individually.
For next season, City suggested raising the threshold from 10 matches to 16, but City Matters negotiated it down to 14.
Then there is the ‘flexi-gold’ ticket. This has replaced the ‘silver’ ticket, which offered supporters access to 14 home league matches per season and provided an opportunity to buy tickets for the five others — usually against rivals — for more expensive, non-season ticket prices.
The ‘flexi-gold’ ticket is available for an initial £150 fee (City had initially planned to charge £190 before City Matters intervened). This allows supporters to buy tickets for individual home matches, giving them the choice to go or not. Supporters must attend at least 10 games to keep their spot for the following season and the club say this allows fans the freedom to opt in to matches. If the seat is not taken up, the club can sell it — for a higher price than the ‘flexi-gold’ member would pay — ensuring that it is not left empty.
Figures provided to City Matters showed that for the Premier League game against Burnley in January, 16,000 season-ticket holders did not attend, with around half of those neither listing their ticket on the exchange nor transferring it to friends or relatives. The average number of home league matches attended by season ticket holders is 14, so there is some mitigation for City’s attempts to resell tickets, where necessary.
Critics say that, given the demand for season tickets and the fact that no new ones have been made available since 2021, fans who want to attend every game on the ‘flexi-gold’ ticket end up paying the full price of a season ticket by buying each match individually, plus £150 on top for adults or £75 for under-18s.
A change to that particular offering has caused distress for one 31-year-old supporter, who spoke to The Athletic on condition of anonymity as he did not want the club to discover his identity.
He had been using the ‘silver’ ticket for the past two seasons and picking up tickets for the biggest matches from friends and family, sometimes free of charge, but now cannot afford a season ticket after buying a house last year. The removal of silver as an option leaves a ‘gold’ season ticket as an alternative but represents a rise of £300, from £450 to £750.
City’s team has delivered success – but at what cost? (Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
“I have a spreadsheet with all my outgoings,” he says. “I earn £35,000 a year. I’ve got a pretty decent position in a small business and I like to live within my means, I don’t take out any credit apart from the mortgage.
“But I’m looking at that (the ‘flexi-gold’ price) and thinking, ‘I could really do without that’. I’m feeling the pinch, at the end of the month I don’t have a lot of money left and I can’t make financial decisions with my heart.
“I was going to jack it in and go back to picking tickets up here and there, but I felt depressed because I love having access to the club and being in the South Stand with my mates. Life’s tough for people and I don’t like that the club made this a tough decision for me. I felt like something in my life was being taken away.”
The fan’s father has since offered to make up the difference, knowing how much City means to him. “They’ve got you by the balls and the heart at once,” he says, in summary.
For many supporters, an inevitable consequence of price rises is an inferior atmosphere inside the Etihad, something that has been especially obvious during recent midweek games against Burnley and Brentford, where tickets have been on sale for more than £50.
“Non-core fans, in general, don’t sing; they don’t understand the club’s culture,” the fan quoted above says. “There is a duty not to be sat there like you’re watching a musical in the West End, but that’s what it’s become. The club are just thinking about the pound coin.
“This conversation can get horrible because people talk about ‘tourists’ and that can mean non-white people, and I don’t like that. There are a lot of wealthy, middle-class British people on day trips, wearing half-and-half scarves, who don’t support City. That’s a really important element of this conversation.”
City’s fanbase is now global (Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images)
City are not the only club at the centre of this debate. At Tottenham, complaints about South Korean fans in attendance, due to national-team captain Son Heung-min being a key player in their side, had become so prominent that head coach Ange Postecoglou was asked about ‘tourists’ going to their home matches.
City will no doubt have seen the red-hot atmosphere for that Real Madrid semi-final home leg last season, despite their controversial ticketing policy, and felt encouraged that there would be no discernible difference in atmosphere regardless of whether those in the stadium have been going to the Etihad for years or if it was their first time.
It is not something that has been repeated in lower-profile matches and with City working to increase the capacity of the North Stand, an expansion which is due to be completed in August next year, there is a belief that matters will only get worse.
“I don’t have much hope at all that the North Stand will be even targeted as being an atmospheric end,” the 1894 Group spokesperson says. “The club has to have a business case for it and that doesn’t fill me with a lot of hope that it’s going to be affordable or cheaper tickets.”
Beyond the finer intricacies of the arguments — around prices, atmosphere or attendance figures — a growing number of supporters and influential groups are becoming dissatisfied. And for many of them, August’s Community Shield was a wake-up call.
“Out of 33,000 fans who went to that game, there were 3,000 real fans and 30,000 people who had no real emotional connection to the club,” says the 1984 Group’s Friend. “And when Pep goes and Erling Haaland goes, are those 30,000 going to stay? It will be back to us, and if we’ve walked away, who’s going to go to the games? It’s all short-sighted.”
(Top photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)