Monday morning and I logged on to the official NUFC ticketing site in the hope of getting Newcastle v Spurs tickets.
It was the queue sale this morning, the last chance of potentially getting to this match.
I’d had no luck (as usual) with last week’s ballot for Newcastle v Spurs tickets.
For those of you who aren’t aware of how the process works for home tickets, Newcastle United members have the chance each home game of entering a ballot.
Then if you are unsuccessful in that, a number of days later there is a queue sale. You enter the ticketing site in the minutes ahead of when the sale opens, then when it opens at 10am on the specified morning, everybody is then randomly allocated a queue position.
You wait until that queue reaches your position and then you are allowed onto the site to see whether there are any tickets still left, after this in front of you in the queue have had their chance.
If you know any Newcastle United members who regularly try to get home tickets, they will tell you that it is a demoralising process. Especially with the club refusing to be transparent, refusing to say how many members there are, also refusing to say how many tickets are available each time.
The only thing you do know is that the success rate is very low, whilst I know no Newcastle United members that have the success rate the club have recently claimed. Maybe we are just unlucky…
I was interested to see what would happen with this queue on Monday morning for Newcastle v Spurs tickets.
It was painful watching that Brentford match yesterday, I thought at least there would be a possible silver lining of it putting some NUFC Members off from getting in this queue this morning.
United have lost five of eleven Premier League matches and this Spurs match is on a Tuesday night in December, a not great 8.15pm kick-off, plus it is live on Sky Sports, meaning you can watch it at home or down the pub, rather than paying a minimum £58 (plus having paid £37 for a year’s membership) for one of these Newcastle v Spurs tickets if you get lucky in the queue. That £58 price for an adult if you are in the Leazes or Gallowgate, more if you can get a one-off ticket in the East Stand.
The clock ticks to 10am
Here is me thinking just maybe I will get Newcastle v Spurs tickets for us this morning, cheer us up yesterday.
Then 10am swings round and my queue number is revealed as…57,600+
Yes, more than 57,600 in the queue ahead of me.
Checking with other members that I know, I heard of queue positions in the high 60,000s, 40,000s and the best was somebody who had a queue position of just over 24,000. For the uninitiated that is still miles away from getting lucky in the queue, you usually need to be in the very low thousands.
Oh well, onto the next home match, the next ballot and subsequent ticket sale.
It makes me laugh with many season ticket holders who have no experience of trying to get tickets as members, they are totally in denial about just how crazy the demand is for tickets. Especially the season ticket holders who want to believe that most of the Newcastle United Members are football tourists and/or people who have only recently became Newcastle fans after the takeover and who will be easily put off if the team aren’t successful.
My experience is that it makes absolutely difference to the demand for tickets, whether the team are doing well or not. Whilst certainly the Newcastle Members I know, are all longstanding fans who either boycotted Mike Ashley and gave their season tickets up, or else their circumstances meant they have always gone match to match trying to get tickets.
I know there are no doubt some neutrals/tourists who try and get tickets, but only a very small proportion of these aren’t NUFC fans, with certainly not so many Scottish schoolchildren now getting their hands on them…
I think safe to say that a Tuesday night in December won’t see you unable to move for football tourists swamping St James’ Park, Spurs at home not the most attractive match either, so pretty confident I can say that all but a few of these 60,000/70,000 and more (maybe in the comments below, others can say if they had even higher queue positions for these Newcastle v Spurs tickets this morning?).
Well done to those few in the queue who got Spurs tickets this morning, back to the drawing board for me, a bit like Eddie and his players after Brentford…