According to some sources, Aberdeen will demand a 50% allocation for the Scottish Cup Final at Hampden.
Few things in Scottish football are more ludicrous than the SFA’s system for allocating tickets for big games.
For a start, it is inconsistent.
There has never been a written rule that allocates tickets equally between two cup finalists; the last time Aberdeen got to a Scottish Cup Final, in 1999-2000, they played Rangers and got 7000 tickets less than the Ibrox club. It’s but one example; this is an arbitrary judgement which often produces absurd results reflected in empty seats all over the ground, which isn’t the kind of picture you want to paint of a major cup final.
There has always been a simple way to decide this stuff, but it must be too complicated for the beaks at Hampden to judge. Cup semi-finals are played at the same ground; a team’s final allocation should be decided on the strength of their attendance in the previous round.
If you can’t fill Hampden for a semi then forget about an equal share for the deciding contest.
As much as I understand that cup finals are special occasions I also understand basic fairness; it’s all well and good to say that the glory hunters or the one-game-a-season fans are entitled to their chance to attend a showpiece, but they do it at the expense of guys who go every week, and would never miss a game they could get tickets for.
It’s hard to muster enthusiasm for giving tickets to people who haven’t been to a single game this season at the expense of those who attend them all. It sticks in the craw. There will be Aberdeen fans clamouring to attend this one who have not given a single penny to their club or any other in the course of this campaign, and they might well end up sitting at Hampden whereas someone who has followed Celtic everywhere – including to Pittodrie, actually handing money over to Aberdeen which said “Aberdeen fan” didn’t do – goes short.
And yes, I know the same might well apply in the Celtic end. This is what happens on these days. But by granting a 50% – roughly 23,000 tickets – allocation to a club who’s average attendance is 12,500 is simply barmy and makes the problem a hundred times worse.
This is a complete inversion of how it’s supposed to work.
The guys who go to every game ought to have priority, it just as simple as that.
CQN has led off with this, and their article, and the idea espoused in it, would surely be a better solution than simply granting Aberdeen’s cheeky request for half the ground. Give both sides a set allocation and hold the rest of the tickets back to see if they both sell out.
If Aberdeen don’t then we get the rest.
Otherwise it’ll be a farce.
They couldn’t even hit their average home attendance mark at the weekend when they sold 12,000 tickets for the semi-final against Hibs. This is their high water mark. Throw in another 3000 tickets to boost them to 15,000.
Thrown in another 3ooo for the sake of fariness, and it ought to be the best they can hope for when the final comes around.
As CQN has pointed out, they got 50% for the League Cup final and there were empty spaces everywhere. They didn’t sell out their allocation then and I see no reason to believe they will sell it out this time. It’s embarrassing for them even to ask.
18,000 tickets is more than enough to cover demand for their hard-core, committed supporters, the guys who are at Pittodrie regularly.
Their ground holds 22,000 … their average is 10,000 short of even filling that every week.
18,000 tickets one third more than their average attendance and is around nine times what they need to cover demand from their away fans, those who contribute to Scottish football generally.
This is where, as a Celtic fan, I get sick and tired reading puerile whining and bitching from supporters of other clubs when they push this notion that we’re some kind of malign influence on the game here. Celtic fans fill away ends week in week out, and some clubs would be on their knees if we hadn’t done that consistently, especially with no club called Rangers in the league these past five years. I’ve read outright garbage on fan forums which suggest that our fans – and those of Sevco by the way – be banned from taking away tickets. “They’re not welcome, either of them,” is one comment I read recently.
The simple truth though is if their clubs ever one day embraced the utter half-wittery of that statement and attempted to lock us out that it would cost them a fortune in lost revenue. Do these clubs have so much cold hard cash they can afford to lose that kind of money? I doubt it. Hearts and Sevco alone might manage if they locked our fans out; they do frequently come close to selling out their home games, even with seriously reduced away fan allocations. The rest? Forget it. Those clubs depend on two home games against us every year; look at the general outrage from a couple of them because the split hasn’t delivered that.
Aberdeen said before the League Cup Final that, like Celtic, their “demand would far outstrip supply.” That proved not to be the case, as anyone could have said. But even if it had been, how do they account for that when their average attendance at home is so poor by comparison? Celtic’s demand will certainly exceed supply; even if they gave us the whole ground that would be the case and it would near enough cover our season ticket base.
It’s hard to imagine that a single Celtic season ticket holder will not want to be at this one, with the treble on the line and the possibility of an unbeaten domestic campaign. That makes Aberdeen’s 50% allocation demand all the more ridiculous.
Aberdeen did, in fact, do something very interesting for the League Cup final. They guaranteed the face value of every ticket they got; in other words, they told the SFA that they’d reimburse the association for any that went unsold. If they want an equal allocation that should be the binding condition on which they get one.
Even then, I still expect them to return many thousands to the SFA.
There really does need to be a better way of deciding this stuff.
This is Scotland. It’s time to get real about this kind of thing.
The current system is a joke.