Tag Archives: Newcastle

Premier League Grounds and Me

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This Saturday my visit to the Cardiff City Stadium means that I will only be missing 1 ground that I haven’t ever been to of teams currently in the Premier League, I thought I could just revisit some of the memories I’ve had at some of these grounds in different competitions as  was quite surprised when I realised I was only missing one.

I’m sure there are fans out there that have been to all of them twice over, but I don’t earn a huge amount of money and don’t have an away scheme membership so to build your away games up is difficult and means starting at the bottom. I’m pretty proud of the many different grounds I’ve been to over the seasons.

I remember me and my brother doing the games which didn’t require a lot of credits when we just starting out, Wigan, Newcastle, Sunderland, West Brom etc. We did these until we had enough credits to get to some decent games, the London ones and teams like Villa and Everton. Eventually we got to the level where we could always be sure to get a ticket for whichever game we wanted to go, United, Chelsea, Spurs and Liverpool.

White Hart Lane

My record at those big clubs is not good, I don’t think I have ever seen us win against United at Old Trafford, or against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. My mate was having a stag in Brighton on the weekend of the 5-3! My record at Shite Hart Lane isn’t to bad, see us win 3-1 with the AADDDEEEBBAYYYOORR goal and a lovely strike from Cesc. Seen us win 4-1 in the Carling Cup but also the 5-1 loss, but around my time of going regular to see us at WHL they have been coming back and starting to beat us and get points from us more and more so its been difficult there in recent seasons with 2 losses on my last two visits.
Had some nice times up north, was at the 4-4 Newcastle game, Ozil’s first game this season at Sunderland was a good win, remember some good wins against Liverpool one of them with Podolski’s first goal I believe, a lovely goal from a counter attacking move, also when we managed to get a point up there with a lovely own goal from Reina. Stayed up there that weekend I think and had a great night out! Had a good night out in Newcastle as well after the 4-4 game, its hard not to have a good time out in Newcastle to be fair.


www.footballgroundguide.com

Villa Park is always nice because its usually around Xmas time we go there, last time I went we won with a goal from Jack Wilshere, a header would you believe! Remember him sprinting over to the away fan section kissing the badge! Lovely moment. Also Everton is one of those ground I love going to, has a proper old stadium feel and I love being in the away section there. I was there for the game we won 6-1. It was a 5.30pm KO and we had got the train up there early that morning, been on the lemonades all day and so by the time came around we were all quite worse for wear, I managed to see one goal before being turfed out by the stewards! Walked up to an Everton pub and watched the rest of it in there. Was approached by this guy at the bar who turned up to be a Liverpool fan and enjoyed the result as much as me. Think a few of the Everton fans ever recognised me from being just thrown out of the ground! Remember going up there with my brother as well, one of my first away games and I drove on a Monday night. Got there with minutes to spare and Eduardo scored and used a hand in the build up which was hilarious as all game Everton fans had been shouting for hand ball. Needless to say its all we did for the rest of the game! “HANDBALL”

Some of the early games we did when building up the credits was on the travel club coaches, Derby away, Sunderland away. Managed to see us lose at Wigan after being 2-0 up, another one we went to when we were starting out, my step dad drove us up. Been to Wolves which was another early train job, was absolutely smashed because of the amount of beer we had drunk, my mate sate in his seat with his head in his hands for the first half! Been to Southampton for possibly one of our worst performances I’ve ever seen, was last season I think, so so poor.
Reading I nearly missed, was getting my car MOT’d the same day and was going to drive round and meet my mates there as they had the tickets, the MOT overran and I was late, managed to get in for kick off and saw us win with a goal from Hleb amongst others I think. The London ones are my favourite, its nice to be able to get the tube to an away game, Fulham, West Ham and QPR when they were up are always decent away games. Was lucky enough to catch Sagna’s shirt against West Ham one year at the end of the game when he came over to the crowd, sent it into the club and they got it signed for me and sent it back! West Brom when we made 4th place on the last day was good, went for a curry in this pub just up the road after the game in their beer garden. Its now pretty legendary for me and my step dad and we cant wait to go back! It was lovely.

I’ll just add at the bottom to these memories, that my memory is shit! And so I wouldn’t surprised if some of you read this and find some errors here and there, please let me know if you do!

I haven’t even started on the cup games, the European games and finals we have been to over the years, might leave that for another time!

Until then, Up the Arsenal and enjoy the game tomorrow!

Matt

Why did more clubs not take up Newcastle’s ‘Twenty’s Plenty’ offer?

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On Tuesday, we began discussion on the pricing scandal at Manchester City. One of the aspects of the article was the Twenty’s Plenty campaign spearheaded by The Football Supporters Federation. On the back of this, Newcastle United offered all clubs in the Premier League a reciprocal pricing agreement where they would charge away fans £20 if their opponents reciprocated the offer.

Of all the other 19 Premier League clubs, only Swansea City and West Bromwich Albion took them up on the offer. A couple of other clubs have done some side agreements, such as Crystal Palace offering to knock £5 off of the Newcastle travelling fans ticket if this was reciprocated, but by and large, the offer by Newcastle was ignored. The question going through my head when reading this was a simple one.

Why?

Everyone says that the reason why a single club is unable to lower ticket prices as they then generate less revenue, and as a consequence, put themselves at a disadvantage to other Premier League clubs. If that rationale is true, why then, would barely any club take up an offer which, if every club took it up, would create a disadvantage not to themselves, but to an opponent. In this case Newcastle United.

Had every club have taken up Newcastle United’s offer, they would all be down a similar amount in revenue, that being the difference between the usual ticket price and the £20. Meanwhile Newcastle would be down 19 times that. So if clubs are refusing to budge on ticket prices due to putting themselves at a disadvantage, why would they not take up this offer? Greed.

Greed can be the only answer. Whilst clubs all pay lip services to giving fans a better service and more competitive prices (‘we would if we could’ is the often justification), when it comes down to it, they refuse to budge.

£20 for an away ticket to go to Newcastle would have been more than reasonable. In fact, I would say it is cheap. With an £80 train to Newcastle still required you are still looking at an Arsenal away fan spending £100 to get from London Kings Cross to Newcastle. Incidental, despite Manchester City charging us £58, my cheap rail (£31) means that the Manchester City trip is actually cheaper. Anyway, I digress. £20 would have been a good deal for fans. But then the brain cogs start turning.

Why can Arsenal, for example, reciprocate the Twenty’s Plenty agreement with Newcastle, but then not offer the same to Sunderland, Southampton or Swansea. Why can they not get an agreement that Twenty’s Plenty with Cardiff and Crystal Palace? The fact is, they would have no justification to not come up with similar agreements throughout the Premier League.

One reciprocal agreement would have raised the questions of more. More would have created more. And before you know it, all Premier League clubs have decided that Twenty’s Plenty for all away fans. One deal would have unravelled the cartel, the price fixing, amongst Premier League sides.

You see, they all agree to keep prices high, everyone has to pay that high price. One club makes the Twenty’s Plenty offer, the cartel then has a decision. Either all adopt it, or all boycott it. They decided the latter. Premier League clubs act as a cartel. All agreeing to keep prices high to ensure profits are maximised.  They are no different to energy companies or supermarkets. All of whom fix prices to ensure it is the customer that loses out. They do it for greed.

Greed is the only justifiable reasoning for all clubs not jumping all over Newcastle’s Twenty’s Plenty offer. The joke is, how little the greed actually makes Premier League sides.

Arsenal has the second largest away capacity in the Premier League, after Manchester United. The maximum amount of tickets an away side can claim in the Premier League is 3,000 (although the area can be expanded to 4,500 behind the goal for cup games). Now Arsenal announced earlier this season that:

“There will be five ‘A’ Category, eight ‘B’ Category and six ‘C’ category matches in the Premier League across the season.”

Now a little bit of mathematics shows that the 5 Cat A games will generate £310 per seat. the Cat B ones £284 per seat, and the Cat C games £153. A total of £747 for all 19 Premier League games. Now divide this by the 19 games gives you an average of £39 per seat.

Now if you are still with me (and not bored or in the process of taking off your socks to check my maths), the difference between £39 and £20 is £19 (I did that one without my calculator), that works out as £361 per seat over the 19 league games. Now for the magic.

£361 multiplied by the 3,000 seats is £1,083,000. That is how much Arsenal would lose if they offered every Premier League side an away ticket for £20.

£1,083,000

That is the cost of a Premier Leagues greed. Taking into account that, as we mentioned, Arsenal have the 2nd largest ground, and amongst the highest ticket prices, it is unlikely that anyone will have a bigger loss then Arsenal. £1,083,000 is the price of a football clubs greed.

Now it might seem a large number to some of you. However, when you take into account that in 2013, the turnover of Arsenal Football Club was £242,800,000, a little over £1m is no longer that big a number. It would be 0.4% of our turnover. The greed of Arsenal, and other clubs, is so minuscule it is unexplainable. £1,083,000 for a football club is nothing, especially when the new TV deal, in this season, will see the BOTTOM clubs income rise by around £22 million. The greed is unexplainable. But then again, the greedy always want more.

What the clubs are clearly worried about is the Pandora’s Box that Twenty’s Plenty could open. If they can offer away fans tickets for £20, why can they not offer home fans? And they the ball of string will begin to unravel. By boycotting Newcastle’s offer, they ensure that away fans do not get a better deal, and as a consequence, ensure that home fans continue to pay a premium.

If that box were to open, how much would it cost Arsenal? Well their match day revenue is around £100m (give or take), were they to offer tickets for £20 to all 60,000 supporters over a 28 game seasons (taking into account average amount of cup games) Arsenal would see a revenue drop from £100m to £33.6m. Around a £60,000,000 drop (although this does not factor in the coporate seats). Now that is the greed!

All I know is that Arsenal Football Club would not miss £1,083,000 if they agreed with every club in the Premier League tickets for £20, however, as a regular away fan an extra £361 (approximately) in my pocket over a season would make a BIG difference.

Keenos

Time for train companies to be fair to football fans

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Firstly allow me to start this blog off with an apology. Yesterday was the first day since the new site went up that their was not a blog. I blame National Rail for it as no trains back to London from Swansea after 7.30 meant The Arsenal away support had to spend the night in Wales. And what a night it was.

Millions of football fans travel up and down the country each week for football. Whether it is Arsenal fans using the London Underground to Finsbury Park, Manchester United fans getting a Virgin train out of Euston to go to Old Trafford, or the loyal away fans of every club getting a train from which far fetched corner of the country they live to whichever far fetched country they are going to. Football fans are hugely reliant on public transport.

The private companies running the trains also benefit big time from football fans. Were it not for football fans, there trains would be nearly empty of a weekend. I would estimate that football fans put over £100 million into the pockets of these train companies. We are key customers for them.

Therefore, I am questioning why we are treated so badly by the train companies. I will not mention the awful British Transport Police, as we all know they create more problems than they solve. It is the train companies themselves who get right up my goat.

The last 2 away days have been to Sunderland and Swansea. And what a nightmare they have been for the travelling fans. At Sunderland, you have to get the train from Newcastle to get back to London. East Coast trains decided to schedule their last train out of Newcastle to London at 5.50pm. This gave fans less than an hour to get out of the stadium, walk to either Sunderland or St Peters Station, do the 20 minute tram to Newcastle, walk to Newcastle station, buy beer and find the train. Talking to a few supporters, they were leaving the game 10 minutes early to ensure they got this train. Failure to do so would have resulted in a 5 hour 3 train journey taking you via Sheffield & Loughborough before getting into London at midnight.

It would have been very easy for the train companies to put on 1 more train at around 6.15, just to ease the pressure. Make life a little easier. But they did not.I bet if One Direction were playing in the Gateshead Arena they would have done, or if the athletics was on there would have been an extra train, but when it comes to football fans…no chance. The Sunderland train ticket cost us nearly £100 – more on this later.

This was not a unique experience. As mentioned, we had to stay in Swansea due to the lack of public transport after the game. The last train out of Swansea was at 19.32. Impossible to get unless you left early. All that was needed was a train 15-20 minutes later and everyone would have been all right.

But no, the train companies do not treat football fans like human beings. They clearly have a ‘stuff you’ attitude. Knowing that fans will attempt to get to the game not matter what, they become inflexible and do not do anything to help a fan out.

Then we come to the cost. The average away game outside of London costs £50-£100 to get to. When you take into the rising cost of ticket prices, you are looking at an away day now costing between £150-£200 once you add in food and a couple of drinks. I went to Benidorm for a week, all inclusive, including flights, for £250 a few years back.

And flights is another thing. Easy Jet, Ryan Air, British Airways, and more, all hyke the price of a flight up when it comes to away fans. Return tickets for Dortmund were north of £200 within minutes of the scheduling being announced. If you went another random mid-week, it would cost £50. How can they justify this? If it was not football fans, the European Commission would be getting involved and telling these companies that they can not fix prices like this.

And again, the airline operators should be grateful. If it was not for football, they would not sell any flights to Naples on a Tuesday from London. Rather then be happy with a few extra bob made from a football game, they have become greedy, knowing some fans will pay whatever just to go to the game. It is unfair.

Luckily we live in London, so can get nearly anywhere without too many changes. I do feel for fans over other clubs who often have to come into London just to get elsewhere. Adding to the cost and time.

Train companies, stop scheduling non-essential engineering works on match days. Put on later trains. And everyone stop putting up prices and screwing every penny out of football fans.

It is time the train companies helped the football fans out. Continually screwing them over is not good for anyone. They need us. We need them.

Keenos

Ps: the ironic thing is I’ve written this whilst my train has been delayed by 30 minutes due to overrunning engineering works between Clapham Junction and Twickenham.