Tag: Arsenal ticket exchange

The day they stopped believing

Amy O1 Comment

Every time I’m watching TV and Arsenal has had a goal scored against it or a poor result, I’ve opened the ticketing app to see if the setback has had an impact on people selling their tickets on the ticketing exchange. It never has. This has given me a picture of resilience among the fans. Their tickets, by and large, have been precious and their belief in the team has been firm. True, at least, if ticket retention can be understood as a leading indicator.

That said, fans have been more vocally upset about how Arsenal has been doing. Which is to say, basically not really challenging Liverpool for the title. Arsenal sits in 3rd place with a game in hand on the second place team. Hardly a terrible season but after narrowly missing out on the Premier League title last year and a little less narrowly the year before that, and Man City falling apart spectacularly, yeah, you feel like why can’t this be our year? It can’t because Liverpool is much revived after losing its beloved manager Jurgen Klopp for a new guy, Arne Slot, and striker Mo Salah having an amazing year. As well positioned as Arsenal are in the results table, Arsenal’s point total is technically as close to 8th place as it is to 1st. Every rare time Liverpool falters, so too does Arsenal.

Now there are plenty of extenuating circumstances. Most importantly, there has been one important injury after another. Although Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has shown he will happily rely on a team sheet that is working for him match after match, he has had significantly more limited options for much of this season that preclude putting his best/favorite team on the field. I’ve rarely been disappointed by the lineup he puts up but there is a lot shifting around. And the results are not ideal.

My husband and I realized there were three home matches within one week this week, so we endeavored to get tickets for one of them so we could justify going to London and try to get the others. We had failed to put in a ballot for the Manchester United FA cup match and our ballots were rejected for the Tottenham and Aston Villa matches. We had a reasonably easy time getting tickets on the ticket exchange for the Aston Villa match (club seats, so not ideal, but at least in the stadium). We bought plane tickets and organized a hotel. We had no further luck in getting tickets for the other matches before Friday, when we would leave Chicago.

I guess you could say our luck got worse on Friday because my husband slipped on ice on his morning walk and was concussed. He showed up at my bedside in the morning with a head wound and his hands experiencing burning pain. We drove through a snow storm to the emergency room where he had a CT scan, two staples, and got prescriptions for pain relief and muscle relaxants. The doctor said it was technically ok to go to London, but given the pain he was in, we decided not to. We got home and I started working. We hadn’t cancelled anything because it was already too late for some of the arrangements and didn’t matter when we cancelled some of the others.

Late in the afternoon, I detected some strange activity. “Uh, what are you doing?” I asked my spouse. He said “I’m packing for London.”

OK, then! I had not packed or, really, even showered that day due to the early morning excitement. But I can be flexible, too. So I did those things and we flew to London that night. I knew by the time we were at the airport there’s no way we should have gone to London, but my husband would not hear of turning around.

He’s not seen much of London so far this week, but he’s finally off the muscle relaxants and more alert. He is keenly hoping to have a London Pride before we leave London.

I’ve also not seen much, because I’ve been working. But I do get a lovely walk each morning and to work in a cozy hotel lobby facing a pretty courtyard next to St Olave’s church where supposedly is buried, uh, “Mother Goose” and diarist Samuel Pepys.

That brings us to the first match on Sunday where we were fervently hoping the Arsenal ticket exchange would be opened to people who had not balloted for Manchester United FA Cup tickets. That never happened given high demand from people who had unsuccessfully balloted. Instead I arranged to have roast at The Marksman at noon after which we would supposedly attend the match. The exchange had closed and, while we had a yummy lunch, with regard to tickets for the match, we had nothing.

In any case, Arsenal had a match to contend with. Although I thought Arsenal played great in the first half, we continued to have trouble scoring and the tide changed again in the second half. Manchester United was pretty dire, but they still managed enough action to score first. We scored not too long after that, with nice work from Gabriel. Meanwhile, it seems our injuries just kept piling up. Gabriel Jesus left in a stretcher. Jurien Timber had to be subbed out. Manchester United did a lot of fouling and had a man sent off with a red card. But even so, we could not break them down. And it didn’t look like we would be able to. We had a chance for Martin Odegaard to score a penalty. He has never missed a penalty. But his kick was saved by the keeper that day. The match went into overtime and then into penalties to settle it.

And from there, our keeper David Raya saved none of the penalties and Manchester United missed none of their kicks. Meanwhile, the Manchester United keeper saved one from our Kai Havertz. Very disappointed to already be out of the FA cup competition.

Once we were back to our hotel after watching the match I noticed something I’d never seen before in the age of watching the ticket exchange. Tickets for the Tottenham match were in bigger supply than anything I’ve ever seen before. There have been days I’ve clicked for a ticket probably hundreds of times and not seen a single ticket. On Sunday, I was seeing an available ticket on almost every click. I couldn’t access any of them, but they were there. Keeping in mind this Tottenham match is on a weekday night and therefore a bit less desirable, probably, for many people, this is a match against our biggest rival by far.

The next day, the number of available tickets was even bigger and not just for club seats. My husband and I managed to find and buy non-club seats together. All day Monday and Tuesday the number of seats available was at unprecedented levels. Just this afternoon, a few hours before the match, more than 30 seats were listed and available. It’s true they were mostly club seats and as I previously stated, when sitting at the club level, you just kind of feel like people aren’t quite into it. Still you would expect some interest and excitement in this match.

I know it’s just behavior on a ticket exchange, but this marks the first time in a long time that Arsenal fans seem to have lost hope and belief. I am sad for sure and yes, here we are probably knowing this year is not the year.

I’m leaving for the match soon. I know a lot of things can happen. It’s hard to imagine they will be positive things.

But I do believe in this team. If not today, or this year, some day and some year.

Wish us luck.

Mission Possible

Amy OLeave a comment

It’s continued to be difficult getting tickets to Arsenal matches after our more reliable source dried up before last season. Currently, we’re arguably able to get tickets because we paid the club the annual membership fee of about $60 to be “Red Members.” A Red Member is able to participate in the Ballot for each home game, essentially a lottery. About 5-6 weeks in advance of each match, the lottery opens and we are able to enter a ballot for one ticket per person. Then a few weeks later, we receive an email from the club about how we fared. If we are successful, our credit card is charged for the tickets and we can plan our travels. (We refer to this as “winning the lottery.”)

If we are unsuccessful in the ballot, two additional avenues remain for receiving tickets. We can attempt to buy them in Arsenal’s official exchange, which for most matches is limited only to those who were unsuccessful in the ballot for that match. Or, we can attempt to use secondary websites where tickets are resold, like StubHub. We refer to the latter as “illegal” tickets, not that they are technically illegal in any way, but the club really does not want them sold that way and has been hammering away at eliminating this market. And you are for sure taking your chances about whether you will actually receive them and whether they are legit.

Many of the secondary resellers guarantee your purchase in the sense that if the tickets are not received and/or not legit they will intercede and make sure you are made financially whole. Which is ok-ish when your failed ticket only involves you taking the Tube across town and being turned away from the match. For us, we have invested in air tickets and hotels and taken PTO, and being repaid for the failed/illegitimate tickets doesn’t quite get the job done.

We had a fair amount of luck with the ballot early last season. We applied for all matches except for a couple during the month in which I was undertaking daily radiation therapy for breast cancer. (BTW: I’m fully healthy now!) We were able to get three matches via the ballot. My husband was able to get one ticket from the official Arsenal Exchange after a failed ballot.

As you may recall, the Premier League was only won on the last day of the season and Arsenal were fully in the running. I could not get even a nibble of a ticket on the official exchange even up until 10 hours before the match when we would absolutely have to be boarding a plane to get to the match in time.

To torture myself, I even kept checking even after there was no possibility of being able to get to London on time for the match. Not one ticket.

This season, we’ve applied via the ballot for every match except one….and been unsuccessful in every ballot. This leaves only the possibility of getting tickets on the official Arsenal exchange. Keeping in mind that every ticket in a stadium that holds 60k people has been sold, you’d still think someone might get sick, need to attend a wedding, have something intervene and sell their ticket. But a remarkable few end up arriving on the official exchange. When one does arrive, it gets snapped up immediately.

This creates a necessity–for those who are committed to getting to a match–of committing to keeping the exchange app open on your phone as much as possible and regularly clicking the button to see if any new tickets have arrived. 99.91% of the time, none have. 90% of the time one actually comes up, by the time you click less than a second later, it’s already gone.

For me, I have to also commit to being aware at all times what the operative cost is for airfare. If airfare is completely unreasonable, it saves a lot of clicks on the Arsenal exchange.

This brings me to the Leicester City match last Saturday. We received the rejection email from the ballot about a month ago, but I had a particular reason for trying my best to get tickets through the Arsenal exchange. We were already going to be in Europe for a trip taking place during a 4-week sabbatical offered by my company. If we’d been able to get tickets by Monday the week of the match, we would have been able to change our travel plans and go directly to London instead of flying back to Chicago from Amsterdam. But no matter how many times I clicked the button to refresh the results on the official Arsenal exchange, no tickets were available.

That is, until we were in line to board our flight from Amsterdam to Chicago on Tuesday morning. I clicked ONE MORE TIME and a ticket came up. I actually could select it and get to the payment page of the app.

I dropped out of the boarding line, pulled out my credit card and worked through all of the problems that occurred during the timed period by which the transaction needed to be complete–both because of restrictions on the Arsenal web site AND because the door to that airplane was going to close.

Given the fact that our luggage was already loaded on the plane and my husband was on the plane and our travel agent who could have helped with rescheduling flights was asleep in the US, there was no question that we HAD to fly back to the US rather than going to London. And that meant arriving in Chicago from Amsterdam on Tuesday and making air plans to travel to London on Thursday.

I was the last person boarding the plane, but I owned an official ticket to the Leicester match. I was shaking with excitement as I sat in my seat.

Once one of us had a ticket to the match and both of us had air tickets to get to London, we still had to work to get a match ticket for my husband. A great amount of clicking occurred over two days with nibbles of tickets, but no actual tickets.

As we were driving to the Chicago airport on Thursday, we finally were successful. The transaction was completed as we pulled off the highway into the exit to O’Hare. We both ended up having to buy Club tickets, but at least at market price.

Much as we hoped that a more reasonably-priced option might come up on the exchange (and then we could sell our Club tickets), we were never able to get one before the match.

But we had tickets! And we were happy.