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.