With two days to go, as well as looking forward to a (potentially very) historic day for AFC Wimbledon, many of us are musing on how to best use the words "brewery", "Conference" and "piss-up" in the same sentence. Along with their partners in crime See Tickets, the Conference Board - and in particular the sub-committee who set the the ticket prices for the Play-Off Final - appear to be doing their level best to exploit, alienate, and generally get on the tits of as many fans as possible.
Predictably, the first problem is the price. The cheapest ticket is £36 (plus a mandatory £3 booking fee and a transaction fee). Thirty-six pounds to watch a non-league game of football. To put that in context, let's look at the cheapest tickets available for some other matches this season:
League 2 Play-Off Final (Old Trafford): £26
League 1 Play-Off Final (Old Trafford): £30
Championship Play-Off Final (Wembley): £36
Johnstone Paint Trophy Final (Wembley): £24
FA Trophy Final (Wembley): £30
The Conference argues (in response to my polite enquiry as to why tickets are so expensive) that the "average price is below the average charged by the Football League" for the League 2 final. Which brings me neatly on to the second problem - the pricing structure. For all the other finals, be they at Old Trafford or Wembley, there is a wide range of ticket prices available. The most expensive of the five price levels for the League 2 final is £56, giving a range of £30 between cheapest and most expensive (compared to the range of just £5 between the cheapest and most expensive tickets for the Conference final). This means there are tickets available for people who can afford a good seat in the middle tier at the side of the ground, while there are also tickets available for those fans whose resources are more limited. Fans who can't afford, say, £36 for a ticket can therefore buy cheaper seats which, although they won't have the best view in the house, will allow said fans to attend the match, cheer on their team and be able to say "I was there". Unfortunately for us, it seems the Conference sub-committee either didn't consider such an obvious concept, or simply don't want poor people to attend their game.
Having a range of ticket prices not only takes into account the varying levels of wealth among fans, but also acknowledges another familiar concept that seems alien to the Conference, namely that some seats offer a much better view of the game than others and are therefore worth charging more for. Ticket prices for the Conference final are determined only by the tier they are in, and not their position relative to the pitch. Lower tier, row A, at one end of the ground? £36. Lower tier, 20 rows back, by the halfway line? £36. It all makes you wonder if any of the infamous sub-committee have ever been to a football match.
Having already noted that the Conference appear to be trying to keep poor people away from the game, I've identified more groups that seem to have incurred their wrath. Namely, the evil-doers that are the young, the old, and the unemployed. The Conference's way of keeping young people away from the good seats is to only make under-16 tickets available for the cheap seats in tier 1. So if you want to take your wife (or husband - no sexualism here) and two children to the game and sit in good seats, it will cost you four full-price tickets. Plus booking and transaction fees, naturally, thus making the cost of the trip over £170 before you've even got to Manchester and bought the overpriced commemorative programmes/burgers/drinks etc. As for senior citizens, and the unemployed, the Conference doesn't seem to want these doddering, shiftless, workshy losers in the stadium at all, never mind the good seats. Because there are no concessions at all for these groups, even in tier 1. Presumably they can all go to the same pub as the poor people and watch the game on Premier Sports - assuming there is a pub somewhere in the country that actually has Premier Sports, which is doubtful.
And the mistakes don't stop there. Because of the need to sell a large number of tickets in a short space of time, the Conference chose to use a ticket agency. That's fair enough, but unfortunately the chosen agency (See Tickets) aren't every fans' favourite right now. For a start, there's the way they offer you the 'best tickets' available for your selected block, but unfortunately they believe that the closest seats are automatically the best, with the result that for the lower tier, the best seats are deemed to be in the first few rows (which, for the other play-off finals, are in a lower price range than the rest of the lower tier). After the website offered me seats in row D, I rang the ticket hotline, at which point I was offered exactly the same seats. When I asked if there were any seats available further back, I was told that they could only offer me the seats suggested by the computer, and couldn't look to see if others were available. This led to a bizarre game of online ticket-purchasing chicken, whereby I would occasionally check to see if other poor souls had snapped up the lower seats thus leaving me with the option of buying better seats further back, but at the same time worry that if I was too late checking there could have been a rush and all the tickets would be gone (in the end I chickened out altogether and spent an extra fiver to have seats in row B of the second tier). What doesn't improve my mood is that I've just checked to see if this is still the case and an extremely helpful gentleman at See Tickets gave me a full choice of available seats for me to choose from. The bastard.
Even when fans have successfully purchased tickets, there are still palpitations to be had due to the late stage at which the tickets are sent out. While this is normal practice for most events, and while I'm sure there will be very few, if any, undelivered tickets come Saturday, it does not help to send a football fan an email on Wednesday telling him his tickets for the final have been dispatched and will arrive in "2-3 days".
And one final cheery thought on See Tickets - judging by the Luton message board last night, it seems that the See Tickets website temporarily stopped working for them and some Luton fans announced that they proceeded to buy tickets for the Wimbledon end instead. Hopefully that's just a bit of 'hilarious' trolling on someone's part, as most of the respondents to that thread said they had no such problems.
All in all, the attendance is going to be lower than it could - or should - have been, though by how much is difficult to tell. Posts on the message boards indicate that there are people who cannot afford to go, or cannot afford to take their children, and many have said that they have mates who didn't support the Dons but would have considered going along if it wasn't for the exorbitant cost. But mostly, fans will be going because although they think the tickets are too expensive, they can't afford not to go. It is this loyalty that is apparently being exploited by those that set the ticket prices.
So what have the Conference said about all this? Have they apologised or attempted to rectify the situation? Er, no. Conference spokesman Colin Peake, who is not going to win any popularity contests any time soon, has come up with a number of mealy-mouthed statements. Here's a few:
"The Conference sub-committee decided the pricing but Manchester City are running the game. We have to comply with them and they dictate things." (Also note this from the AFC website "At a Conference meeting on Thursday 12 May, the Board was notified that the arrangements [for ticket pricing] were in the contract with the City of Manchester Stadium which has been signed.") So, Colin, you set the price but Man City are dictating things? How are they dictating things, exactly? What say do they have in determining the ticket prices that were decided by the Conference sub-committee? I asked Manchester City the same questions but unfortunately they haven't got back to me yet (probably busy answering questions from less important organisations like the Guardian, The Sun, the BBC, SW19's army etc).
"If tickets were half [the price], people would still complain." (As quoted in this week's Non-Leage Paper) No, Colin. No they wouldn't.
"They weren't far off this price last year but it didn't stop 30,000 Oxford fans going to support their team" (Again, as quoted in this week's Non-Leage Paper). That was Wembley, Colin. With all due respect to Eastlands, it's very different for a fan (of any team) to be able to say "I saw us win at Wembley" compared to being able to say "I saw us win at Eastlands".
On the subject of cost of venue, when cuddly Colin was on BBC Radio London's Non League Football Show, he refused to answer questions from Dave Anderson on whether Eastlands was the same price to hire as Wembley, claiming that he wouldn't know the full cost until August. Just like the DA, I couldn't believe what I was hearing - was no price agreed in advance? Or are Manchester City free to invoice the Conference for as much as they please? If Eastlands isn't the same price as Wembley, why are the tickets not similarly reduced in price? If it is the same price as Wembley, then the Conference has been well and truly diddled.
To make matters worse for us Dons fans, our Chief Executive didn't do himself any favours with his appearance on this week's Non League Football Show, by refusing to criticise the pricing structure. He may be somewhat hamstrung in the views he can offer as he has a seat on the Conference board, so hopefully the suggestion that he is keeping his powder dry until after the event (and hopefully after our promotion at which point he will have nothing more to do with the Conference board) are true.
I'll leave you with one final quote from my favourite Conference spokesman from his appearance on last week's Non League Football Show "One of the things that you will get in the promotion final which you did not get with the FA Trophy final at Wembley on Saturday - you'll be able to watch ours on the television[...]for £6.99"
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