Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has urged more of the supporters to turn up for their upcoming clash with Southampton in the Premier League.
Man City defeated RB Leipzig in a nine-goal thriller at the Etihad this evening, but there patches of the stadium which were left unfilled.
If you compare that to the turnout at Stamford Bridge for Chelsea vs Zenit or at Anfield for Liverpool vs AC Milan, it makes City look a little bit silly.
In what’ll do City fans no favours in battling the ongoing joke at their expense over their attendance, Guardiola has urged more of them to come at the weekend.
Guardiola to BT Sport: “I’d like more people to come on Saturday. We will be tired. Southampton are so dangerous. I invite all our people to come 3pm to watch our game.”
— Simon Bajkowski (@spbajko) September 15, 2021
Rival fans will no doubt be fast to take aim at the Premier League champions over this comment from their manager.
Of course, attending evening games midweek is not possible for everyone, but City are probably the only team within the ‘Big Six’ that wouldn’t have sold out.
The Man City ticketing and marketing team will be left red-faced by the fact it’s come to the point where even the manager has to do his bit to get fans into the stadium.
Come 3pm on Saturday, we’ll find out if Guardiola’s plea has had any effect…
Maybe the awful new ticketing system imposed on supporters this season is putting many older fans off if they cannot cope with the technology?
All Man City home PL games sell out.
The additional games that are additional to the cost for a season card sometimes do not sell out and neither do early stage home games in the FAC and Carabao Cup for the same reason.
My wife and I are two of the around 2,500 season-ticket holders have been allowed to defer their place for 12 months, with the option of returning to their same seat in 2022-23, while the club is only re-selling those tickets on a match-by-match basis. This after over 50 years of attending games often with a return journey of more that 200 miles. This is because at our age and state of health a dose of the new variant COVID could well kill us.
Lower the ticket prices for the group stages. This bloated competition only gets really interesting in the knockout stages. We’ve qualified every year in the last decade unlike our out of town neighbours and the group stage costs nearly £200 per person. Leipzig brought less than 100 supporters and our attendance was only 1200 less than Stamford Bridge and 1700 less than the Camp Nou (Barca v Bayern Munich!). There are genuine reasons why we got 14000 more for Norwich and Arsenal…School/weekday night…no love lost for UEFA…Soccer Aid was 11 days earlier…saving money for the PSG/Chelsea/Liverpool games…game on TV…comfortably qualified from the group stage 8 years consecutively…e-tickets a mini nightmare…just saying.