THE CONCRETE ROUNDABOUT (TCR)

A slight change of subject but have the club announced what the arrangements are for Corporate for this game? I don’t believe they have, have they?

A few things got me thinking:

Club Platinum (with a meal and seat in the Directors balcony) is very limited. Capacity can’t be much more than 200.

We usually get a lot of interest from local business for the big games. Their only option would be to hire a box. That’s pricey unless there’s ten of you. Not always possible for business even, let alone a fan with deep pockets struggling to find nine friends/associates/colleagues to fill it.

There’s a huge ballroom for at least five hundred people to sit downstairs.

There’s a huge kitchen to serve those same five hundred people.

A regular seat in Club Red is £32.

A regular seat with meal in Club Platinum is (from memory) about £80 a head.

You see where I’m going with this?

Why would the club want people taking their CR seat at £32 when there’s real money to be made?

I’ll be stunned if there’s not at least a sprinkling of people sat in CR seats a week Thursday. May all be players wives and girlfriends and agents and members of “the football family” and not what we would consider “fans” but they’ll be there.

I’m disappointed that I won’t be able to watch the game from my seat (in the block formally known as the family wing), but I understand the logic behind wanting the ground to ‘look fuller on the telly’. What I don’t understand is not giving the season ticket holders in the blocks that ARE open first chance to buy their own seats. That’s an act of atmosphere killing that seems insane. We’ve never done that before have we?

At a guess it's due to the fact that all season ticket holders can buy an additional 9 tickets. I know that this sounds counterintuitive!

For instance, if I possessed a pair of tickets allocated in the East Stand and wished to invite an additional four guests, yet found that my seating section lacked sufficient adjacent seats, I’d have to look for another area with adjacent seats.

Having purchased these seats the system would still automatically reserve the original seats for me until the hold on seats was lifted, given that I hadn't utilized my entire entitlement. This would block up seats that season ticket holders could utilize before these seats went on general sale.

Remember this is all on the old Tickets.com system and the club are right in the middle of moving everyone over to Ticketmaster. As you'll know changing systems in the middle of a major event is always "fun"! The new DD's from the Ticketmaster system hit on Wednesday this week IIRC.