Emptyhad? Man City stayaways should be applauded, not scalded | OneFootball

Manchester City have at least 115 charges to face but failing to sell out the Etihad 30-plus times a season is way down their list of misdemeanours.

City reached the Carabao Cup final on Wednesday night but much of the post-game focus has been not on who turned up on the pitch, but who didn’t show in the stands.

The attendance at the Etihad in a cold mid-winter midweek was 41,843, including 5,359 Newcastle supporters, leaving just over 10,000 seats vacant.

Empty seats, especially where City are concerned, have always been a great source of amusement to rival fans. Which is weirder now than it ever was.

When City fans pondered parting with their hard-earned to purchase tickets for the Carabao Cup semi-final second leg, plenty will have found as many reasons to give it a miss as go.

Really, the game was up three weeks ago. A 2-0 victory in the first leg over a Newcastle side in a rotten run of form made Wednesday night something of a formality, a view vindicated by the fact City’s advantage grew inside seven minutes, stretching further to five just after the half-hour.

Granted, such sparseness in the stands is not an isolated occurrence. It was a similar story for the Champions League clash with Galatasaray last week and a quick glance at the club’s website shows just shy of 5,000 tickets still on sale for next Wednesday’s Premier League meeting with Fulham.

It should be noted, though, that the only other occasion this season when the Etihad was less than 95% full was for the visit of Brentford on the Wednesday night before Christmas.

City might rue the 30,000 empty seats over three home matches, but at a time when many supporters and the wider public are forced to be choosier about how and where they spend their money, we ought to have sympathy for those making sensible choices, and reserve the scorn for those who have made live football a luxury.

Around 80% of the tickets still available for City versus Fulham are priced at over £50 for an adult, which means an evening at the Etihad for a parent and two children would cost £100 just to get in. More realistically, with travel and refreshments, it’s a £150 spend in total.

That’s not a City problem. They are little better or worse than any of their rivals. That’s what we should be railing against. The difference is that, unlike their playing squad, City’s supporter base doesn’t have the strength in depth to provide adequate cover when some fans might be approaching the red zone. There ought to be no shame in that.

And it would be hypocritical of many to mock City. Just across Manchester, United were offering deals on what tickets remained for their clash with Bournemouth before Christmas, while the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was well below capacity for the Champions League meeting with Borussia Dortmund.

Good. Unless you are of the view that match tickets are perfectly reasonably priced, then surely we want to see fans of all clubs become choosier. As the clubs constantly tell us, prices are set according to demand. If the demand falls, perhaps in our fleeting moments of wild optimism we can dream that prices might too.

Of course, they won’t. That is, in part, down to fan loyalty, but also because many clubs don’t want the regular punters to keep coughing up and turning up.

If they did, in City and United’s case, they would not be selling fewer season tickets. City fans have protested for some time now at the fact that despite an imminent rise in capacity to 60,000, the club are offering fewer season tickets for sale than they did six years ago.

And those they do sell are subject to more and more controls and conditions. At most clubs, no longer is a season ticket yours to do with whatever you wish. Can’t go to the game? Don’t even think about simply passing it on to mate. Clubs now demand those tickets back to sell on for a bigger margin, ideally with some half-arsed hospitality thrown in.

City, United and everyone else must have crunched the numbers and calculated that alienating their core support won’t affect demand in the long term. Maybe there are enough mug punters to maintain the churn of day-trippers who’ll pay the prices in the club shop but add little value to the atmosphere.

It feels like a risky business because all too often the base-level product many clubs are offering is sh*te.

The hefty ticket price often won’t spare you long queues to get in some stadiums and when you do, you could buy a pint of p*ss that passes for beer for £7, as long as you stand on what might be a dark, decaying concourse while you sup it. And when you take your seat, don’t believe the hype about Premier League atmospheres. Those are dying with the influx of the spectators who paid a premium to experience them.

Then there’s VAR. “The in-stadium VAR experience for supporters is poor,” the Premier League’s chief football officer Tony Scholes said in 2024. “It’s nowhere near good enough.” Two years later, it remains the case that a TV viewer on the other side of the world has a better understanding of events than witnesses inside the stadium.

All things considered, perhaps we should credit the City fans who have stayed away this last week with more sense than those who showed up. And many of the supporters gleefully boasting of selling out every week, assuming they ever attend themselves, should pay attention to the company they are keeping, because very soon it will be unrecognisable compared to those that made going to the game a cherished ritual.