blunther

Are the club offering season ticket resale this year, for games ST holders can't make?

Any villa ladies in the England squad?

On 21/06/2022 at 06:16, sne said:

7 years in prison for premarital sex will apply to visiting fans during the WC, no exceptions.

Unless you are super rich of course.

What a **** shithole

On 16/06/2022 at 17:02, OutByEaster? said:

I think it's probably easier right now to qualify for the Champions League by winning two European trophies than it is by pushing into fourth in the Premier league.

 

More fun too. Sod 4th, I want that Conference League and some great away days!

Yeah **** it why not

You knew if we shipped one we'd lose. Didn't expect it within five minutes. Ridiculous capitulation, showing real mental weakness.  Poor end to a disappointing season.

29 minutes ago, nick76 said:

Mate, I think you are generally being really generous with the club over this, it’s fair enough if you feel this way, I just don’t agree.  Putting my 77 year old moms ticket, a loyal season ticket, a Villa fan all her life, in the current climate up 32% is a disgrace!  My family are basically done with our season tickets, I’m the only one on the fence but slipping away.  We know what it means giving up our season tickets and I’m fortunate I can cover the cost if I wanted to but it’s a step too far, taking the pee with everything else.

Yep, no love for the owners from me. You don't get to be a billionaire without being a cold-hearted person who isn't afraid to hurt a few people on the way up. That's the world we live in. They are what they are but they aren't running this club for the pure love of the sport or the club, and they don't give a **** about the fans as people. We're just a revenue stream. That's just how the world is. There's no room for love or sentiment in football anymore. Which makes me wonder... Given its now a global entertainment business with billions riding on it, is it actually still football? Or just one step removed from WWE?

3 hours ago, ender4 said:

This is my biggest issue and one that is so easy to solve. Pour 100 beers just before half-time, line them up on the counter.

Then customers just tap with your credit card and take a beer. Maximum 30 seconds per customer. 

Even just have someone walking the queue taking card payments before they get to counter.  

So many options to speed it up.

We mostly fixed it before with lads with big backpacks of beer dotted about serving people all over the place. Then they disappeared. 

3 minutes ago, CLARETANDBLUEFOXY said:

I also think this may have a knock on effect of ticket availability for members, too. I think you’ll probably see a spike in memberships now as I reckon a lot of ST holders may go down to having a memberships which is going to make getting tickets even harder now even when you’ve forked out for a membership. I’ve never known this club to be so inaccessible! I’ve been going to to Villa Park for bloody years now and even when we were 5th/6th in the league I could easily get home AND away tickets whenever I wanted. I went to so many championship games as well - was there for the semi final against West Brom and even managed to get a ticket for the 2018 play off final. What the **** has happened to make us suddenly Manchester United when it comes to prospects of getting tickets? I only managed to get two for Norwich last weekend cos I luckily refreshed the page the exact moment someone gave their seats up. It’s madness. 

I'm a bit out of the loop with 'membership' and the like but just looked it up - so I need to pay £40 a year for the chance of paying £40-50 for a match ticket if I don't renew?? WTF, we really are just gouging people aren't we.

6 minutes ago, sidcow said:

It would have been helpful to move the direct debits to 10 or even 12 months. Can't understand why they haven't done that. Renew early and get 12 months. 

Yeah with a 12 month then it just becomes a 'permanent' cost, you kind of stop noticing the money is gone in the end if it's every month. Over 8 months there's a big chunk of change missing that you had in your bank the month before. A 12 month recurring ST basically becomes a subscription service. No idea why they haven't done that, saw on the Twitter Q&A that they have no interest in even looking at it. 

3 minutes ago, sidcow said:

The unfortunate truth is that these aren't premium prices though, these are prices other teams have been paying for a while. 

Holte End prices are now a little ahead of Everton Gladwys Street tickets but I bet the facilities in The Holte are much better. 

Just Because others are doing it doesn't mean we have to though. The vast vast majority of our income is through TV money. These changes will raise a couple of million a year, we could probably make more than that by getting a sponsor for the Doug Ellis and leaving ticket prices as they are, or having one less player on the books that never actually plays.

Lower Holte facilities are absolutely awful. The Holte Suite cuts into it so most of the width is a narrow corridor. It's impossible to get food/drink at half time without missing part of the match. Going for a piss takes ages. What's more, there has been absolutely no improvement in the facilities. We keep being promised it, but the prices goes up and up and guess what,  the facilities are the same now as when it was built on the cheap in the early 90s.

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I've not looked at London teams or big 6 but they will definitely be way ahead. 

Again, just because they do it doesn't mean we have to, but even so, London is much wealthier than Brum, their wages are higher and they have the population to sustain it. Also the very expensive clubs like Spurs and Arsenal at least have the facilities to 'justify' such costs - our ground offers no more than a non-league ground in terms of facilities. A couple of bars, some undercooked overpriced food and far too few toilets, and that's it.

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It's all very unfortunate and poor timing but they had to shift the pricing eventually. 

It's the under 21 price that grates with me.  

I don't agree that they did have to shift the pricing eventually. We're all so conditioned to the idea of £50 being a fair price to watch a game of football, but it doesn't need to be that way. Instead of comparing us to clubs like Spurs and Arsenal, let's compare ourselves to clubs in Germany or Spain. They have competitive football, offer a better experience in terms of facilities and still manage to charge less. Despite having less TV money.

Pricing out kids is so short-sighted it hurts. I genuinely hope we don't expand to 50k+ because it's going to be embarrassing down the line when most folk are priced out and the kids all support TV teams due to never having gone to a match.

I know I keep banging on about this but I'm really hurting, if I don't renew it's the end of an era, it's part of my identity, who I am and what I do but this game just isn't right anymore and eventually I've gotta draw a line.

30 minutes ago, mattyvilla said:

Of course but double the price? There has always been some sort of loyalty from the club to long term fans i.e early bird renewals ,  all of this has gone. There is also the fact that these seats were historically cheaper as they were inferior seats , all of a sudden they aren't. The club have disproportionately targeted families in my opinion

All I can think is they've realised that with 24,000 on the waiting list they're looking to get more full-priced adults in instead of concessions taking up seats and paying the cheap prices. Very short-term thinking as if the kids don't get down the match and fall in love with in-person football, they'll all just watch the 'big' teams on telly, and there'll be no one left to go down VP in 20-30 years.

Chatting with the fam and it looks like the three of us with about 100 years of unbroken season ticket between us are out. A bridge too far along with VAR, crap "matchday experience" (I don't care when it was all spit and sawdust but for the Megabucks I expect more) and general 'the game's gone' stuff. Old man's ticket went up 63% (concession in L5). Capped to 50% this year but that's still outrageous. I'm sure someone else will have the ticket, but unless we get some quick success they may well get bored before reaching the sort of history we've got.

Still time to change our mind but seems there's a bit of consensus among fans I've spoken to of this being the straw that broke the camel's back. 

1 minute ago, OutByEaster? said:

About 10% of our total income.

Crazy. TV money should make tickets cheaper, not the opposite. Genuinely don't know how we have so many people who can still afford it these days. 

5 minutes ago, Wurzel said:

One Villa fan saying "If you want European football you have to pay for it" when commentating about the season ticket price hikes on BBC Radio WM. Out of interest how much is generated every season from ticket sales?

Gonna be a lot more vocal disappointment when we pay for European football and finish 13th next season then. 

22 minutes ago, Lochheads twin said:

Wow!

Senior ticket in K6 has gone from £270 to £405. Depending on how you present the numbers, that’s a 50% increase.

was very cheap before, not quite so cheap now. I guess some of the pricing was out of line before. Still not bad value for 19 games ( maybe 20 if they throw in a cup match)

Looks like they may also have raised the age for Senior tickets to 66!

 

£270 to £440 in L5...

I'd pay an increased price if they increased what they offered. I'm not talking about football, that's the nature of the game. But give me somewhere to watch the early/late kick off, that serves decent beer and food for a decent price. Reconfigure the ground so I can go for a piss at half time without scrumming for ten minutes in a cloud of pissy air. Charge premium prices then I want a product that's better than the one that used to cost far less for exactly the same offering. 

Family ticket going from about £700 to £1200... how many future long term fans do we lose to watching Liverpool on the TV for the sake of £500 a year?

What's our turnover, about £200m? Seems such a trivial sum we'd get from these increases.

I'm at about 25 season tickets so far, same seat for the last 15 or so. Gonna have to sleep on this a bit. Wouldn't mind if the matchday offering was better, but it's just traffic or queues to get in or out, **** all to do in the stadium (not even space to comfortably stand and have a pint and a chat in the lower holte), crap facilities, overpriced crap food/drink. Where's the draw? Just habit?

Just now, BOF said:

Which, sadly, is exactly what they want and what they know will happen as there are plenty of people ready and waiting to pay the extra.

Dunno, I imagine plenty of that 24,000 will baulk if/when they finally get the chance, especially since the economy has gone so wrong since that waiting list formed. It's a big chunk of money anytime, but espeically in current circumstances.

Everyone seems to have forgotten the crowds of 27-30k we got fairly regularly under Lambert - we could easily return to that after another season or two of finishing bottom half and not winning anything.

38 minutes ago, Sid4ever said:

18% for mine, as they have moved L5 into price zone 2 from price zone 3 this year, £204 extra for the 2 tickets.

Yep...

And what will that £204 pay for? About 21 seconds playing time for a second string player on 50k a week.

There's too much money involved for these sums to make a difference and it's leaving a nasty taste in my mouth. Gonna have to really think about it this year.

2 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

Lambert was good for a season, then after that he was dreadful. I remember that period where we kept losing games under him as teams kept scoring corners against us as ws were absolutely hopeless at them. We got humiliated by lower league sides in the cups too. The bradford one was unforgivable. We should have won the cup that year

Yeah Bradford was a complete **** up. Would have been the only time we'd have played a side you'd fancy beating in the final too.

I seem to remember about 25k turning up a couple of times. Also remember losing to I think QPR with about ten minutes to go and the ground was just empty. Must have been a few thousand left at the end.

Lichaj, Herd, Kevin Toner.... I don't know how we expected to defend playing players of that quality though. Lambert was hamstrung, and somehow managed to keep us up for a couple of seasons when we were utterly dire. It's more than some managers could have done is all I'm saying.

7 hours ago, VillaJ100 said:

We also should have gone down a year (2?) earlier too as we beat arsenal away, high flying soton away, Chelsea and drew at anfield which no offense is a haul of points that shower of a team we had should never have got in a month of Sundays. Turn those 10 points into the more likely 1 to 2 we'd ordinarily have got and we'd have been bottom of the league probably

That doesn't make any sense though, you can't just say 'if we didn't get those points we'd have had fewer points', the same goes for any team in any season.

If we'd lost our last three we'd be level with Brentford. But we didn't so we're not.

FWIW looking at some of the teams Lambert had to put out, we had no right to be in the Premier League. I think some of those lineups would be struggling in the championship. The football was dire, it was a miserable time, but I don't blame Lambert for it. I think he could have been a decent manager in the right circumstance but like so many before, a spell at the Villa broke the poor bugger.

Sanson not starting today means he's not gonna get a look in here. Which is a shame as I like what I've seen from him. Think we'll regret letting him go in a couple of years but if he isn't going to get a chance after that last performance it's just not gonna happen. 

21 hours ago, bannedfromHandV said:

I’m probably being thick but shouldn’t the VAR lines run parallel with the line for the edge of the area? 

Perspective ennit. For instance, looks at the six yard line which also runs parallel to the edge of the area.

Edit, sorry, been answered a few times already!