While the FAI tried to shift supporter frustration towards the Scottish FA by criticising it for prematurely declaring next month's qualifying game a sellout and failing to provide the FAI with more than its minimum entitlement of 5 per cent of Celtic Park's capacity, fans' group Ybig (You Boys in Green) continued last night to call into question the way that tickets had been distributed. The group insisted that the problems encountered this time need to be avoided for the game in Poland.
Ybig’s key complaint is that the preferential treatment given to supporters’ clubs is an unannounced shift in policy by the FAI, which had previously favoured customers of its own heavily promoted season-ticket scheme and individuals with a record of travelling overseas to support the national team.
A spokesman for Ybig, which held a lengthy meeting with FAI officials on Tuesday, took issue with the association’s claim that, as it said in a statement issued last night, some “1,700 [tickets] went to supporters’ clubs, season-ticket holders, Club Ireland members and known away supporters”.
“They say that ‘known away supporters’ were catered for,” the spokesman said, “but our statistics clearly show that this wasn’t the case, and when we met them they were unable to explain why that was so.”
Ticket guaranteed
Specifically, Ybig claims that a member of a supporters’ club with no record of travelling to away games appears to have been guaranteed a ticket for the game. On the other hand, a number of home season-ticket holders who regularly travel to away games missed out. Many fans who want to travel to Glasgow for next month’s European Championship qualifier will therefore not be able to go, due to the way the FAI distributed its ticket allocation.
“The FAI has previously said that season-ticket holders get preference, but they have never said that members of supporters’ clubs do. If they had done, everybody could have just gone off and joined a supporters’ club,” the Ybig spokesman said. “The fact is that there appears to have been a major shift in policy here without any warning or any explanation of why.
“As far back as Georgia, we were being told that 6,000 were looking for tickets, so we never believed that everyone was going to be catered for out of 3,200, but we were told that everyone who was in Georgia would get one, and they haven’t. People with a 100 per cent record of attending away games in the last campaign have missed out.
“We are not complaining about the FAI looking after sponsors or business partners that it says it has to look after. (The association says that of the other 1,500 tickets, 600 went to clubs and league, 481 to Abbey Travel and 128 to sponsors, with the remaining 200 divided between players, management and other FAI staff.) All we are saying is that there should be a fair and transparent system for allocating available tickets.”
Buying direct from the SFA
As it turns out, many fans have been able to buy tickets directly from the Scottish FA since last week, with not much effort bieng made to keep away supporters out of home sections.
The FAI last night called on the association simply to provide it with more tickets for travelling fans, although it is not clear whether additional sections in Celtic Park could be properly segregated at this stage.
In the meantime, the FAI, which had said it would buy a limited number of corporate tickets for resale, at a loss, to ordinary fans, told Ybig yesterday that it had sourced an additional 150. Ybig has warned that there will be more anger if FAI chief executive John Delaney begins to distribute tickets personally, as he has done in the past, in the runup to the game.
