Despite earlier predictions to the contrary, Arsenal support is growing and growing « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger in all he does

by Walter Broeckx

At the end of last season we had some people who claimed that the stadium would be empty this season.  Our regular readers will remember that they claimed that the season ticket holders had been voting Wenger out and would not renew.  Later Tony showed that there was no such thing at Arsenal and that the people who didn’t renew was the same number as happens every season.

But to be honest the idea of people not renewing and thus getting more tickets available for supporters who wanted to buy tickets was something I would not find that bad. But that is because I just was looking at my own interest as a foreign supporter. It could mean that I could be buying more tickets with my red membership card and come to more games.

And the most important thing maybe as a board member of our Arsenal Benelux Supporters Club was the idea of getting more tickets available for the supporter clubs.  Every time we come to the Emirates we have to disappoint some members. Not many but every member we have to leave behind is one too many. So the thinking over here was that we maybe could get more tickets this season and take everyone with us.

Is the support for Arsenal going down? Well in Belgium we could see more members coming to our club and also this season we started with more and more new members. And we do this without advertising ourselves in any way. The people who find us are just people who are actively looking for an Arsenal supporters club in Belgium or Holland.

So the article in which Tony wrote that all the season tickets were sold and that the waiting list was still the same should have been a first indication that it would be business as usual. Now I don’t know how things work at Arsenal but I think that every supporters club can name a few games they would like to attend and let Arsenal  know how many tickets they would need. And then Arsenal is sees if they can make those tickets available for the different supporter clubs that ask for that game.

We don’t have to ask tickets for games against Tottenham, Chelsea or Man Utd as we know that they are not available for us. And that is not a problem for us as we can understand that for such games even the local fans find it hard to get tickets. Let alone those of us from across the Channel.

So when our president asked if we could attend the  Newcastle game the first mail back was, “We will have to see because we have received a lot of requests for tickets for that game from the different supporters clubs.”  But after a while we got the confirmation that we would get tickets.

But the bad news was that as a result of the high demand we could only get 20 tickets.  Fewer tickets than we got last year, but more members in our books. We knew this would be a hard decision waiting for us. But then again we told ourselves: maybe there would be some members who could not come to this game on a Sunday? Maybe we had some members on holiday as that is the last day of school holiday period in our country.

So we hoped that we would not have to disappoint too many people. And when we announced on our website that we would have tickets for the game against Newcastle we had some members who have been with us for years saying that for various reasons they could not come with us this time. So a gentle feeling arose on the horizon that we maybe wouldn’t have to disappoint a lot of members.

But the moment we opened the subscriptions for tickets to  our members, our server almost crashed. Now it doesn’t take much to crash our server  but the tickets were sold in an instant.  We had 20 tickets and we would have sold the double. We even had to stop the program on our server after one day because it would make no sense to let people go on ordering tickets if we already had to tell half of the people they would not be able to come along. We still hope to buy some tickets with the red membership cards from some of our supporters who have one. And a silver member in England who couldn’t attend this game came to help us a bit and I thank him in name of our supporters.

So I look at this with a mixed feeling.  I feel proud and delighted that the support for Arsenal in our countries is growing and growing. Despite the “lack of trophies” in the last years. It is our name and our brand that attracts new supporters. But I also feel sad that we have to disappoint so many supporters.

And I feel a bit sad that Arsenal has only the opportunity to give us just 20 tickets when we would be able to sell the double or even more. Couldn’t there be any chance of expanding the Emirates a bit? Some extra seats  somewhere? I know a lot of us over here would love it.

And this story (a little success story of just an ordinary supporters club outside the UK)  shows once again that despite what some say, the support for Arsenal is not going down. No, it is growing in fact. We get more and more demands for tickets, and more tickets and  even more tickets. More and more people pay their membership in the hope they will be able to come with us to London. People want to come to the Emirates and are prepared to pay a lot of money to achieve this. So forget all the stories about not as many supporters for Arsenal. Yes, maybe the plastic fans will have left. Maybe the silverware fans will have left by now. But will we miss them?  I don’t think so.

So it will be not this season that the stadium will be empty. And those of us  over here are just hoping that for our next group visit later this season we get some more tickets. So that the responsible people in our supporters club don’t have to disappoint the Gooners who at the moment are not able to experience the Arsenal live in the Emirates.

Walter Broeckx runs Arsenal Worldwide for supporters of Arsenal outside the UK