Earlier this week St Johnstone the latest club to slash ticket allocations for both Celtic and theRangers. It’s a self-defeating trend that has gripped the Scottish Premiership clubs and results in empty seats at grounds…
Yet supporters of clubs like St Mirren claim that it’s been a successful move limiting the Glasgow giants to just one stand at their ground. Kilmarnock tend to have the most empty seats when the big two are in town, despite knowing that they could easily accommodate all of their own supporters and still give Celtic and theRangers two stands instead of one.
St Johnstone are now the latest club to jump on this bandwagon by cutting the ticket allocation of the two Glasgow clubs, following the likes of Hearts, Hibs and the aforementioned Kilmarnock and St Mirren in doing so.
Indeed theRangers are lucky that they are getting any tickets to McDiarmid Park, judging by the comments to the announcement on the official St Johnstone Facebook page. Their support reckons that following the disgraceful assault of the Saints SLO by Rangers ultras at Hampden recently, theRangers should get zero tickets for their next trip to Perth.
The Saints owner sent this open letter to the St Johnstone support via the club’s official website:
Dear Saints fans,
I wanted to take this opportunity to communicate directly with you about the important matters of matchday attendance and our plans moving forward for matches against Celtic and Rangers.
Your unwavering support as part of our loyal fan base is the cornerstone of our success. With that in mind, I want to emphasise our commitment to making McDiarmid Park a true fortress for our team, particularly when hosting Celtic or Rangers. Historically, we have sometimes allocated the East Stand to visiting supporters and moved supporters to the Geoff Brown Stand. We have also allotted more seats than necessary in the Geoff Brown Stand to opposing fans. Under our new policies, to be announced later this week, opposing fans will be limited to the Ormond and North stands and one section of the Geoff Brown Stand which is legally required to accommodate disabled seating.
For this initiative to be successful, we need you – our dedicated fans – to turn out in force. We understand that this requires a collective effort, and we are committed to making it as convenient as possible for you to attend. We are putting extra provisions and planning in place to enhance your matchday experience, including improvements in accessibility, safety, parking, and stadium services.
Finally, in light of some recent unsavoury incidents both home and away, we have reviewed and updated our terms and conditions for accessing McDiarmid Park on matchdays. These updated guidelines are designed to ensure a safe and enjoyable environment for everyone. The new terms and conditions will be made available later this week. We encourage all fans to familiarise themselves with these changes.
We value your input and are keen to ensure that any decisions we make are reflective of your needs and concerns. To this end, we will be gathering feedback through a working group, which will include fans and representatives from the club and the police. Your voice matters, and we encourage you to engage with this process to help us shape the future of our matchday experience.
I want to thank you for your continued support and dedication to St Johnstone. Together, we can make McDiarmid Park a venue where every Saintee feels at home and where our opponents face the full force of our collective spirit.
I look forward to seeing you in the stands on September 28 for the Celtic game.
Adam Webb
Owner and Chairman
Celtic don't rely on sky monies to keep the club afloat .
The clubs cutting allocations to away fans do.
Half empty stadiums make for poor tv viewing .Like it or not .Hence the shite tv times for games.
Be careful what you wish for with the petty allocations debate.☘️— The Suly shamrock 🍀 (@Jk6315) September 12, 2024
I couldn’t give a hoot about the Ibrox club or their fans, but when it comes to our club it irks me, like it does with every other Celtic supporter, especially those who like an away day.
These clubs are cutting their nose off despite their face by taking such action. In doing so they are depriving their own clubs of much needed income in a climate where every penny counts. It also paints a bad look on the Scottish game at a time when we are trying hard to promote our game. Half empty stands doesn’t do our game justice, especially when there is a demand to fill those spaces.
I get that clubs are free to make their own decisions on that they feel is right, but what is right about denying your club of much needed funds when they desperately need them? It doesn’t make sense and yet again casts a doubt on the future of the away supporters as a viable thing in the Scottish game. Communities with supporters buses travelling up and down the country supporting their team and in doing so filling the coffers of clubs up and down the land.
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Celtic also need to do everything that they can to avoid empty seats. We have written about the need for a Ticket Exchange Scheme and that should come along at some point in time. In the meantime Celtic should look at giving away teams (excluding theRangers as a separate deal is in place for them) coming to Celtic Park a maximum of the number of their supporters who visited Celtic Park previously.
These clubs are all within their rights to say that they are putting their own fans first. Yet Celtic have a huge demand for tickets for Paradise and there are thousands of Celtic supporters who can’t get a ticket on match day at Celtic Park, yet there are usually always spaces in the away corner.
And hopefully for this weekend Hearts have received no more tickets that they give us for Tynecastle, despite having evidence that the seats they have taken from Celtic remain unsold and they end up with empty seats and lower revenue. For what? Spite.
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St Johnstone has a new American owner who is still getting to know the lay of the land in Perth. A few years ago Saints had a home Scottish Cup tie against theRangers and the visitors were given three stands because the game was not on the St Johnstone season ticket. Despite all St Johnstone fans who wanted a ticket getting one, there was outrage and the club vowed never to let this happen again.
The reduction for the Celtic visit at the end of the month is smaller than the headlines might suggest, the two stands behind the goals will still house Celtic supporter and there will be some reduction to the numbers in their main stand. The stand opposite seems to have seats that no-one ever sits in.
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Land prices are on the rise in West Perth with the new motorway extension opening up land for new housing development. McDiarmid Park is on prime development land and there has been talk of building a new standing reducing the capacity by 50% to around 5000 on the outskirts of the city. Basically St Johnstone admit that they don’t need a 10k capacity stadium yet are turning their backs on football supporters who want to attend McDiarmid Park.
It just doesn’t make sense.
Just an Ordinary Bhoy
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any club who cut the tickets to us should be told to keep their tickets, and lets see how they survive, our fans dont cause trouble its the team from govan
Would make sense if our main team could get out of Scottish football?
Could play a development team within Scottish football along with players not getting much game time with our main team?
Even at that, the rest of Scottish football would struggle to keep up with ourselves, especially as we remain so far ahead of everyone else within Scottish football?
Clubs committing financial suicide, then they will be crying they cant afford to buy new players or make substantial cut backs in staff to survive. Maybe time for both sets of supporters to get together and both boycott their games certainly send some shivers down their treasures spine.
I genuinely think it’s a bigger societal problem….by that, I mean a malaise that you see everywhere.
1930’s – grounds all packed
1960’s – same
1990’s – kind of the same
2010 – still punching
2020’s – post pandemic, big empty spaces at grounds
Also, nowadays, you have less young people going to pubs. As a result, loads of them over the last 10+ years are closing. Same with nightclubs. Society trends are changing, mainly driven by online engagement. Folk chat online, and as a result, there is less meeting up in society numbers for the things we used to see mass crowds at or just a busy atmosphere.
Football is being crushed by obscene money. The EPL is the worst. Brentford and Brighton could buy a player that dwarfs the entire team of most of our PL clubs! I do think if any form of Euro league takes off and we can start playing regularly, then the SPL might even be okay, the same or better (but not worse) if we moved onto bigger things. If you take the oligarchs, hedge funders and state control out of football, you are left with a fairer set-up. And sadly, it will never go back to that. Football has become bling. The top teams, players, they are on a par with music stars, film stars, American sporting institutions, basically a globalised fanbase.
So with all other teams cutting allocation, I could be way wrong here (personal opinion) but I think the other clubs may be doing it for several reasons but one of them is the die-hards. What I mean is, every team has a solid core fanbase. This is the one fanbase you never want to lose. They are the nucleus that your overall support can grow from. And these clubs know that moves like this appeal to the die-hards. From rangers, Hibs, Aberdeen, St Johnstone, Hearts, Motherwell etc, they need a core fanbase as they don’t have celebrity fans, or international coverage. They just have the fans here. So overall, they keep the core of fans seeing that the club are with them in solidarity etc etc. And they hope that they will rebuild the periperhal fanbase. Because they can’t have it shrink further and they can’t hope that just relying on away fans is a solution.
Where we differ is the core fanbase. Ours is huge and amazing! And we are successful, generally playing exciting football especially against SPL teams. We are the glamour in Scottish football, even if that sticks in the craw of the ‘others’. Go to a pub in London, it’s heaving. Go to a pub in any city here, it’s half full likely, if that. Just the way of the world at present.
What would maybe address it is if clubs are brave and speculate to accumulate. Call a fan meeting. Ask fans what they want. Put it to them that if the away support money is there, shouldn’t they take it? Or if not, should they reduce kid’s prices to ensure more backsides on seats? Whatever innovative measures they draw up, that’s up to them. It’s not great when we can hardly have away fans in numbers but it just means the opposite for them too. As when they come to Parkhead, they have hardly any of their own fans and get hammered