Only 25,000 Tickets for United Fans

25,000 Tickets
By Chris O'Brien
April 21 2007

The Football Association have handed Manchester United and Chelsea supporters 25,000 tickets each for the F.A Cup final. Over 40,000 tickets will be going to over-paid officials, club officers and members of the controversial Club Wembley Scheme.

Ticket allocations for this season’s F.A Cup final have been confirmed and, once again, it’s the real supporters who will be missing out on the big day.

 

Manchester United and Chelsea supporters have been given 25,000 tickets each – meaning each set of supporters have been given little over 25% of the ground’s capacity. The rest of the over-priced match tickets are being allocated as follows:

• 17,000 are going to members of the Club Wembley scheme.
• 23,000 tickets will be sold to various clubs and football organisations affiliated to the FA. These are being split between officials of all 92 professional clubs, the 134 full member clubs and between various Uefa, FIFA and other international football associations.

To make matters worse, United and Chelsea fans will not even be entitled to all 25,000 of the tickets allocated to them. Both clubs are giving a high number of tickets to their respective sponsors meaning even less will be going to fans of the clubs actually participating for the country’s greatest trophy.

 

With the low numbers of tickets on sale; the 'black market' and 'touting' trade is set to soar in the lead up to kick-off. The whole thing is ridiculous and is another frustrating example of the F.A taking the game away from its supporters and handing it to the fat cats, money men and its own officials.

 

From a Manchester United perspective; of the 25,000 the club will receive; little more than 15% of them will be priced at the cheapest £35 mark. The rest are priced between £60 and £90 - further frustrating fans all will already have to pay hundreds of pounds to travel to London to watch the game.

 

The tickets will be priced up as follows:

• 4,000 will be priced at £35.
• 7,700 will be priced at £60.
• 10,500 will be priced at £80.
• 2,800 will be priced at £95.

Sounds expensive, eh? 

 

To make matters worse - it's going to be difficult enough for United fans to get tickets in the first place. With the pitiful allocation and sponsors tickets taken into consideration, the club have been forced to introduce strict criteria for allocation. A rough guide is as follows:

• Top priority is being given to box holders and executive members.
• Next in the pecking order are season ticket holders who have purchased ticket for all nine of United's home cup matches this season - which were against Glasgow Celtic, Copenhagen, Benfica, Aston Villa, Portsmouth, Reading, Lille, Middlesbrough and AS Roma. However, the club has some 37,000 supporters in the 'automatic ticket scheme' and therefore immediate priority will be given to those fans who have applied for the most away matches this season.
• In the extremely unlikely event that there are still tickets remaining after box holders, executive members and fans with all nine home cup games have been offered them; the club are expected to offer tickets to standard season ticket holders and then One United MUFC members. However, they are expected to have sold out by this stage and the club has advised fans that have not purchased all nine cup tickets not to apply at this stage.

Good luck if you try and get a ticket - more information can be found on the club's official web-site.