Following the announcement of ticketing processes for next season, there has been debate and discussion around a number of points, but specifically in relation to the changes made to ticketing priorities and guarantees.

Fans have raised concerns about missing out, particularly Season Ticket Holders (STHs) who feel that they may now be disadvantaged when purchasing away tickets.

With the aim of reassuring fans, we have highlighted the main reasons why these changes have been brought in.

We do not believe this will impact on STHs’ ability to buy

Our intention is not to make buying tickets more challenging for those STHs with the highest TAPs or take away that advantage - that is not why this decision was made and we do not believe this will impact your ability to buy. The data from last year backs up this decision.

Last season’s process was inefficient

The process for buying away tickets during the 2021/22 season was highly inefficient, with less than 34 per cent take up in the initial guaranteed windows followed by several windows for each match which were nowhere near fully taken up.

Fans had to wait longer and couldn’t always book together with too many sales windows

This meant that our fans had to wait longer to secure their tickets, were unable to sit together and at busy times, sales windows became complicated. As a Club we had a lack of flexibility within the process, even when sales were stagnant and we could estimate that even by going on sale to all STHs, we were unlikely to sell out our allocations.

We don’t believe the changes for this season will prevent our most loyal fans from being able to buy a Match Ticket to away games. This is a data-driven decision, and if we find that (against our expectation) this is regularly causing an issue, we will review the process on an ongoing basis.

Here is the data that supported and shaped our new policy:

Category A (Cat A)

Category B (Cat B)

In short, we would need a third more of our STHs purchasing these Cat B away matches next season at the time of the first sales window, before anyone would be in a race to buy their ticket. We deem this to be a very low risk.

Finally, two of the main complaints which we heard from fans last year were:

Our new approach improves both of these situations without compromising our higher-level TAPs holders unless demand is significantly higher this year.

To close, it is worth reiterating that we will keep these changes under review throughout the season and that we will also reserve the option to increase the TAPs requirement for the games that we anticipate being in very high demand.