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Manchester United’s apology yesterday about tickets for the South Stand being sold to Galatasaray fans has done little to appease fans.
The issue, vehemently denied by club’s chief operating officer Collette Roche, was that the club were touting their own tickets by reselling general admission seats donated to the Man United foundation.
Roche claimed that bots had snapped up general release tickets by mimicking “long-standing official members”.
For many fans, this did not ring true and in fact evidence that United are doing something similar for the FC Copenhagen match is freely available.
United Peoples TV observed that “Right now, the club directly is touting tickets to Copenhagen for £175. The perk? Access to the museum…”
So @ManUtd are briefing to the press that it is season ticket holders selling on to Galatasaray fans that saw hundreds of their fans pocketed around Old Trafford?
Right now, the club directly is touting tickets to Copenhagen for £175. The perk? Access to the museum… pic.twitter.com/dW90TfGTPE
— United Peoples TV (@UnitedPeoplesTV) October 5, 2023
As a fan living overseas who cannot buy a season ticket, I can verify this practice is now the norm at Manchester United, and it is scandalous.
My partner and I paid £70 for our memberships and joined the queue for this season’s home game tickets 30 minutes before they went on sale this summer.
The queueing system eventually told us that all tickets for Premier League home games had already been sold before redirecting us to the corporate hospitality section.
There, we were offered poor tickets in the upper sections of the North Stand for £225 each under the guise of them being hospitality tickets.
As in the case reported above, the “hospitality” aspect was free entry to the museum.
It is inconceivable that every non-season ticket holder’s ticket to every single game of the current season could have been sold out 30 minutes before even going on sale to members only.
This despicable practice works twice over for United. They sell thousands of seats for inflated prices and also receive £35 each from fans paying for membership to apply for tickets they never had any chance of getting, because they were already being sold by the club at four or five times face value.
At best, even if Roche is telling the truth and it is bots somehow mimicking members and snapping up the tickets, United must have been aware of this at the start of the season. So they have had ample opportunity to fix it. But they have done nothing about stopping it and are continuing to profit. They have have had ample opportunity to warn fans that it is happening but they have not. Nor have they apologised to people who have paid for membership or offered them a refund. And they have done nothing to stop opposition fans from gaining access to United sections, endangering their own fans’ safety.
At worst, the situation is this: United know they will sell tickets for four or five times their face value, but know there would be uproar if they did so. So they go through a sham of selling these tickets at face value but really are holding the vast majority back so they can resell them under the guise of “hospitality”.
If that is the case, it truly is disgraceful.
2pm pic.twitter.com/XLJyENM4Iq
— Toe In The Water (@ToeInTheWater1) October 7, 2023
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