Very decent article in the Guardian regarding stay away fans

Manchester City struggled once again with the first home match of a Champions League campaign on Tuesday, but at least Paul Scholes (on television) and Rio Ferdinand (on Twitter) enjoyed themselves counting the empty seats at the Etihad.
There were roughly 10,000 missing fans for the Roma game, making City’s “We’re not really here” song seem unusually appropriate and giving United supporters and former players endless opportunity to make unfavourable comparisons between the shallowness of the Etihad atmosphere and the boiling cauldron of excitement that is Old Trafford on European nights.
That is exaggeration, of course. There have been many memorable European nights at Old Trafford, though the first home game of the group stage is not generally an occasion to get the juices flowing, even when the opposition has been respectable. By the same token, Liverpool’s return to Champions League football after an absence of nearly five years produced a riot of flag-waving and impassioned singing at Anfield this month when Ludogorets were the visitors, but in terms of actual atmosphere the night was nothing to write home about, and will quickly be forgotten when (if?) Liverpool progress to the knockout stages.
But at least Old Trafford and Anfield were full, is the point Scholes and Ferdinand were making. If your stadium holds 48,000, and you only get 38,000 for a game against the second best team in Italy, what is the point of expanding the Etihad to a capacity of 60,000? What if you build it and they still don’t come, to misquote what was already a misquote from Field of Dreams?
Over at the Theatre of Dreams there always seemed to be an endless supply of people waiting for a chance, any chance, to watch United, and while that occasionally gave rise to a flat atmosphere and chants of “60,000 muppets” from rival supporters, it undeniably kept the turnstiles clicking and gave the – not entirely inaccurate – impression that United were one of the hottest tickets in England.
Scrolling through some of the explanations posted by City supporters in defence of the gaps on the terraces against Roma, you get a strong sense that it might be a while before the blue half of Manchester matches the red half for slavish devotion. 1) It was live on television. 2) Season tickets are already expensive enough; most families cannot justify the extra expenditure on top for a game that could be watched free to air on a mainstream channel. 3) Champions League group games are boring anyway. The contest only really starts after Christmas (for those clubs still in it by that stage). 4) City were unfairly fined by Uefa over financial fair play 5) Tuesday night is a terrible night for football and the traffic is always bad. 6) You can’t drink alcohol inside the stadium on Uefa nights.
You get the idea. Whether that is fickle, fair-weather support or reasonable, responsible rationale depends on your point of view, and possibly on the colour of your scarf. But two points should be made.
Manchester City fans have been through a lot these past two or three decades, and generally the level, commitment and humour of their support has been admirable. Fickle they are not. Secondly, ticket prices in this country are massively inflated, as my colleague David Conn detailed in these pages at the start of the season, and in terms of charging paying customers scandalously more than they would be expected to stump up anywhere else in the world, football is becoming dangerously close to unaffordable.
Some clubs are lucky to have worldwide appeal, so that coachloads of fans from Japan or Norway can help take up the slack; others, mostly in the capital, have a more affluent fanbase that can hold out a little longer before the pips start to squeak. But you don’t have to be on an FSA protest march to realise that most people do not have bottomless pockets, or that a 1,000% increase in admission prices since the post-Hillsborough Taylor Report is unsustainable as well as unfair.
That staggering percentage rise, by the way, is extrapolated from the fact that admission to the Kop at Anfield at the time Lord Justice Taylor was making his report cost £4. The cheapest Anfield matchday ticket now is £46.
Back in 1990, you could get into Old Trafford for £3.50. You had to stand, but that was the expected norm. This is not an argument to bring back standing areas – though given their success in keeping football affordable in Germany there is certainly a discussion to be had – but it is worth noting that when Taylor recommended all-seater stadiums on the grounds of safety, in the stunned, sickening aftermath of Hillsborough, he did so with a caveat that any resultant price increases should only be modest ones, and that clubs should not use the new regulations to ramp up admission prices.
Now that Arsenal are charging away fans more than £60 to get in, it can safely be said his stipulation has been ignored.
That, if you like, is the rule of unintended consequences. Football grounds needed to be safer, they were made safer, the supporters ended up picking up the cost and then some. Football clubs don’t even need gate money any more, not in the way they used to. Television income alone would allow admission prices to be halved at a stroke if there was a will. Yet of course there is not a will, and now there is this vague concept – in that no one seems to fully understand it – called financial fair play.
What was supposed to level the overall playing field has done nothing of the sort; if anything FFP protects the established elite and makes it harder for newcomers to join the party. But, and here is the rule of unintended consequences again, FFP impacts on the fans because it forces clubs to maximise revenue. City are a rich outfit, they have wealthy backers and oodles of television money, they could have made seats available at £10 a time for the Roma game. Except that is not possible anymore, because the balance sheet at the end of the season is what your overall spending will be judged against. This is the reason Chelsea are looking into moving to Twickenham for a season, to the horror of local residents. They need to expand Stamford Bridge. Not because Roman Abramovich is running out of money or they think the television tap will be turned off soon, but because the club needs to make more money from fans. That is the new bottom line.
Liverpool are the same. They are staying at Anfield now, not moving to Stanley Park after all, but when the capacity is eventually increased there will be no reduction in admission prices, not even a freeze for a club which historically prided itself on remaining accessible to working-class supporters. Liverpool ticket prices have been increasing since the Fenway Sports Group takeover, and that process is set to continue.
This is the new reality of Champions League football. It might be what every leading club aspires to but it ain’t cheap. Clubs are banking on 60,000-seater stadiums being full all the time, but there is no guarantee that will happen in every case. Especially in the early and frequently overhyped staged of European competition. So before mocking Manchester City’s tepid support, put yourself in their place. If you cannot identify with a single one of the six stay-away reasons mentioned above, you are probably a United fan. You might even be Paul Scholes or Rio Ferdinand.

I'm sure that if it wasn't for FFP, our ticket prices would be lower than they are. The higher than inflation increase in seasoncards is just down to FFP.

Not only is this monstrous obscenity preventing us from buying who we want, it is also stopping some fans from watching the club they love live.

Still bugs the life out of me that Rags call us for empty seats.   The bottom line there is to get a season ticket you MUST also buy a ticket for European Games and FA Cup matches.  The only ones they can opt out of are League Cup.

We don't do that, so there cannot be a direct comparison.  If we did it would be full, but I'm not sure they would sell as many season tickets if we did.

There is a balance and while I think they should have made them a fiver or a tenner less they were not far away.

Well.....I think we all said 6 months ago.

Somebody needs to challenge UEFA and FFP and use these arguments as a classic example of it's ruining of competitive football and not allowing a club, with plenty of financial means, to reduce their tickets for their fans.