West Ham and Liverpool get 48,000 tickets for FA Cup Final

[crowie]

From BBC.

I hate reading stories like this and wondering/knowing where the other 26,000 tickets go. Your basically getting a "3 sided final", Liverpool, West Ham and corporates all getting roughly 1/3rd of the available tickets. Although its a cup final and everyone is always on their best behaviour you can't help think this will create a segregation nightmare as some of those 26,000 tickets are bound to end up in mixed hands.

Hammers unhappy with Cup tickets
West Ham United
West Ham are unhappy with their 23,500 ticket allocation for the FA Cup final against Liverpool in Cardiff on 13 May.

The Hammers hope it ensures every club bond-holder and season-ticket holder can attend but it is unlikely tickets will be available to club members.

A club statement said: "The size of the allocation is a major disappointment after the allocation of almost 34,000 for our two recent play-off finals.

"We recognise many of our loyal fans will be unable to attend."

West Ham's allocation could rise to a maximum of 24,000 and the combined allocation with Liverpool will be around 48,000. The Millennium Stadium has a capacity of 74,500.

"The ticket allocation is roughly the same for each of the two finalists and we must accept that, for FA Cup finals, many of the tickets are sold directly by the FA instead of through the participating clubs," the club explained.

[keemanan]

They simply dont care about fans crowie , not news I'm sure but if they could get away with selling ALL the tickets to the corperates then they would.

It all started with Luton , they banned travelling supporters and made a whole side of their ground open only to exec boxes , the chairman basically said they he didn't give a tinkers cuss about the fans.
United sold their soul long ago and are paying for it now . these all seater stadia have no atmosphere and your forced to spend all season sat next to people you cant stand because you have to have a season ticket , ffs you have to do that at work too.
Football to me is more and more a betting oppertunity than something I would spend money on watching

[all_funkt_up]

Funnily enough Crowie, I was looking around yesterday for tickets for a mate who doesnt have enough 'credits' to get one through the club. I saw tickets on the 'net for £900. The FA dont give a toss do they.... The FA's regional associations get an allocation of tickets that they have to buy from the FA if they want them. Then it seems, they are free to sell them on to whomever they want, for however much they want. If they FA wanted to stop 'touting' or massive mark-ups they could. Fact is they dont give a toss.

I understand that the FA has to make money from hospitality, which is why i think offers like this one are OK. If someone wants to pay £13'000 for a 12-seater box then fine by me. But inflating the ticket prices 700% is just plain wrong. No hospitality, just a massively expensive ticket. There's nothing "value added" with that, its just racketeering.

Sites like this one should be shut down IMO. If I sold my ticket in a pub or on ebay for this much money, it would be illegal. How come these cowboys get away with it?

Grrrrrrr

[ONEDUNME]

Just caught a snippet of some geyser from the FA on the radio yesterday and he was saying (and you can take this how you like but it makes sense) that the FA cup final is for the whole country and not just for the two clubs. Therefore, the clubs get 50% between them and the rest goes to the country (other clubs, affiliated clubs etc - in fact our local Saturday/Sunday football clubs used to apply for tickets every year for the cup final, regardless of who got there).


Of course how many backhanders and palm greasers are included in "the rest of the country" is anybody's guess.

[all_funkt_up]

I agree that a percentage should go to the "rest of the country" - fair enough. What pisses me off is that these tickets, oh so nobly distributed to our wonderful workers at grassroots level, will end up being sold in a pub for 5 times the face value. Happens every time. No-one wants to rock the boat, the local FA's pass the tickets on knowing full well that their members are gonna flog them for a few quid....

[crowie]

It really is a piece of piss. Fair enough its "for the whole country" but the two sets of fans who its most important to are the finalists. This is off TAMB, was discussed on there as well

Seriously, every club that competes in the FA Cup (from extra preliminary qualifying round onwards) gets a pair of tickets, as well as local county FAs, referees and so on, not to mention sponsors. As England has a lot more clubs, county FAs etc numerically, there is a greater need for these tickets. I benefitted from this as I managed to get in to the Saints v Ars*nal cup final in 2003 on tickets from Worthing FC

How quaint but as mentioned above, Noddy Town FC's chairman will not doubt be punting his 2 on Ebay and raking in £1000 for them.

Btw, although its not as glamerous an occasion as the FA Cup, Hearts got 31,000 tickets for this upcoming Scottish Cup final, Gretna (population 2,500 or something) have sold their 10,000 allocation and are now getting an extra 2,000. Gretna getting half the number of tickets for their final that Liverpool/West Ham get for theirs And all from a stadium with about 52,000 capacity.

[all_funkt_up]

shoddy I agree Crowie. Shoddy indeed.

Apparently, all clubs get offered tickets and can refuse them if they choose. Apparently at the 'top' end, there's around 100 per club for the top clubs. So in the Prem thats around 2000 tickets for those clubs.

They get returned more often than not, so I wouldnt be suprised to see more released to both clubs eventually. The longer fans have to wait though to get a ticket confirmed, the more they pay for trains/hotels etc etc

[all_funkt_up]

Worth noting that despite this year's capacity being 90'000, the 2 clubs involved get exactly the same allocation. So that's 20'000 more 'suits' at the game. Fucking disgrace.

[slick]

Bloody hell AFU you can dig em out from the past, For a second i thought Crowie was going Potty

I heard this on the news the other day and your right it is a disgrace especially with the extra capacity available.