Right before I go any further I’m going to nail my colours to the board, I’m a silver member at the club, I have been since we moved to the bowl, I also pay for a red membership and 2 jnr Gunners for my family. Keeno’s (our main blogger) is a Gold member who is also on the away ticket scheme, so between us we have 5 levels of membership covered. This suits us both, he’s a young man about town, I’m an aging family man who once did what hes doing now, altho raving did get in the way of going The Arsenal in my late teens and early 20’s like a lot my age. All of the bloggers and admin team on SheWore (2 Golds, 3 Silvers, a Red, 7 Jnr Gunners and another Away scheme member) have been activly involved in supporters rights for about 6 years now and if you are a regular on the facebook page or follow us on twitter you will know this. We see all match going supporters as equal and want a fairer price for ALL fans.
Keenos Gold membership every year covers him for 26 home games. 6 cat A, 14 cat B and 6 cat C over 19 Prem games and 7 cup games. My Silver, Jnr Gunners and Red memberships means I get the chance to buy tickets on a game by game basis at the same price as Keenos and the other Gold members pay (theres reductions for Jnr Gunners of course). Decent discounts used to be given to season ticket holders at Highbury, if you bulk buy in advance like Keenos you deserve a discount off the total purchase price and it’s about 4% for Gold members now, not much but that’s how the Gold membership is calculated.
The upcoming Barca game is the 7th cup game of the season and the club have deemed it as cat A, but this meant it was the 7th cat A game of the season so the club wrongly asked Keenos and all Gold members to pay the difference between a cat A and cat B price. For Keenos that was a surcharge of £16.11 which he was asked to pay when he renews his membership in the summer, to which he was rightly up in arms over, as was I and many others and yes we did have a chat about what we could do about it, hence yesterdays blog our tweets and statuses on the Facebook page.
After HUGE pressure from fans on twitter on blogs on facebook by writing emails by phoning into the club and radio shows and by the supporters groups talking about working together to protest the club backed down on Friday evening and whilst telling fans they’re too stupid to understand the T+C’s of Gold membership they agreed to scrap the surcharge. Well done them, well done everyone who wrote blogs, emails etc. We won, well some of us did….
We are now in a postition where for the first time since we moved to the bowl that the same seat has 2 different prices depending on what membership is buying it, yep, same game, same seat, but Keenos will pay £16.11 less than me if i manage to book the same seat next to him on my silver membership. If Keenos decides to sell his seat on the ticket exchange the club will now reimburse him the cost of a cat B game. If i then purchase that ticket on my Silver or Red membership i am buying it at the cost of a cat A game and the club pockets the difference, it just doesn’t make sense.
Now for all pressure made over the last few days from from fans on twitter on blogs on facebook by writing emails by phoning in the club and radio shows and by the supporters groups talking about working together to protest the Silver, Jnr Gunners and Red members seem to have been left the only ones paying the higher cat A price whilst everyone else is sitting around patting each other on the back saying we won. Well I’m sorry that’s bolloxs and all a little too much “im ok jack” for us, whatever happened to “Gooner Family” and looking after each other ? Thers’s only ever one loser when making imaginary divisions between fans, the fans.
This could be the first danergous step towards a pricing system similar to the airline and train compaines who constantly rip off football fans and hoilday makers at busier times, trust me the club would introduce this if they could and that would affect ALL the different memberships. Even worse is a Permanent Seat Licence, which is used in America and which Keenos mentions in his blog later on this morning . Before you think these will never happen, I never thought I’d have to travel to Manchester to play Tottenham on a Sunday at noon or watch a league game on a Monday evening, just because the camera’s wanted to be there. I never thought i’d see £50 tickets for a home game, let alone £62+. I never thought a game would be played where its impossible to get a train home from. Football and our club has really lost the plot and it will only get worse for match going fans as more and more greed sets in.
The pressure and plans of protest should’ve been kept up to make sure ALL fans got to see this game at the cat B price Gold members are now paying/paid. There’s approx 12,000 Silver, Jnr Gunner families and Red members in the ground every game who also feel the pinch of high ticket prices. I run a little online shop and I don’t charge people different prices for the same item depending on how long they have followed the club or if they have kids, I dont get charged extra for a pint by my local pub as I now only go in there once every other week instead of every night, so I dont see why the club should charge more for the same seat, Everyone Is Equal. Let’s all work together on ticket prices for everyone, home support, away support, kids, families, OAP’s, disabled and students. Let’s keep this up for ALL fans no matter what membership they hold and lets try to push the club back to it’s past ways as a classy family club that looks after ALL its supporters, not just Jack, before its too late.
Gav
She Wore A Yellow Ribbon 