Ticketing shambles
When it comes to consistent football-related buffoonery, I don't think anyone - apart from perhaps Newcastle United - can beat the folk that administer the Football Conference.
No task is too simple for these idiots to cock up. Not content with creating the shambles of player registration-gate (there's a great article about that in this month's When Saturday Comes by the way) they now seem to have employed the worlds worst agency to oversee the sale of tickets for the play-off final.
When you consider that both of last seasons finalists managed to sell their own tickets (via agencies) without any major problems, you have to wonder what possessed the Conference hierarchy to think that they could do a better job in a shorter space of time? Even if they did want to take over sales themselves, why not just use the same system we used last year?
Instead, they've (unsurprisingly) gone for the cheapest option. Or at least I assume it was cheap, given that the website portal you visit to purchase tickets looks like it was designed in five minutes by a myopic monkey armed with Wordpad and Microsoft Paint.
It seems the shoddiness doesn't end with the aesthetics. Despite the fact you can't chose where you sit, the agency seem to have failed to put groups of people together. According to reports on the CUFC messageboard, people who booked, say, five tickets at the same time have found that three of their party will be sitting in one section, and two in another.
In the immortal words of the dastardly Richard Littlejohn, you really couldn't make it up. There are going to be (at the most) 42,000 fans in a 90,000 capacity stadium this Sunday. That they can't manage to even group people properly beggars belief. What on earth are we paying a booking fee for when nobody is putting any thought into this process?
My tickets aren't here yet, and I wait with baited breath to see whether they will be all together or not. The sad thing is that the vast majority of people coming to Wembley will not be regular attendees at United games. Some will inevitably blame the club if this mess causes them to have a bad experience, meaning we could be losing future supporters through absolutely no fault of our own.
No doubt the Conference will continue to use slogans like "For the love of the game" and "Real football, Real fans", when in reality the lust for money dominates at this level in the same way that it does in the Premier League. They certainly don't put the needs of the "real fans" first. Let's hope we get the right result on Sunday so that we can wave farewell to this poxy league (c) Chris Wilder) for good.
3 comments:
Totally agree. I booked 4 tickets for 2 adults & 2 children within a hour of the online booking service coming available on the 5/5 to ensure we got all the seat together or so i thought. I have received the tickets today to find i have 3 tickets together and 1 in the next row. The statement with it states order was made on 8/5. They evidently have just taken all the bookings and not allocated seats to them until over the past couple of days. Even then they seem to have made a pigs ear of it. We have called CUFC to lodge a complaint but have to accept nothing can be done now. As we are season ticket holders know not the clubs fault but others new to watching may think otherwise.
Please U's get out of this league.
I booked 9 tickets in the singing section on 5th May and got confirmation the same day. The tickets arrived this morning. We're in the SW corner well away from the singers. :o( We're all in the same row but have 4 together, a gap of 10 before another 5 together. :o( Total shambles. I reckon the pleasant people at the Abbey would have happily done a much better job if we'd offered them overtime, a few drinks and a big bunch of flowers.
I actually think ANYONE with a modicum of intelligence (maybe that's where the problem lies) could've done a better job with this.
Even Ticketmaster - a generally excreable company - made a better fist of selling the tickets for last years final.
Gotta collect my tickets from the post office today, hopefully they're in vaguely the right area.
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