English Premier League football clubs are continuing to suffer from ticketing issues following the return of fans to full stadiums.
Southampton’s clash with Manchester United at St Mary’s stadium on Sunday was marred by turnstile and ticketing issues, with the club offering to refund fans for their trouble.
In a statement yesterday (Sunday), the Saints said: “The club would like to apologise for the frustration caused by issues regarding match tickets and entry to the stadium today and is already working on a full investigation into these issues.
“We will be issuing a full refund for this game to every general admission ticket holder. Details of this process will be shared early next week.
“Once again, the club is extremely sorry for any inconvenience caused.”
Southampton released a second statement on Sunday evening reiterating its apologies and explaining that the ticketing issues not only related to entry, but also around the delay in physical season tickets being received by holders.
The club’s initial assessment of the entry issues was that “the scanning of tickets took significantly longer per person than we experience in our recent pre-season matches and our own behind-closed-doors testing”.
Season ticket delivery has also been an issue for Saints, which the club has put down to experiencing delays from the supplier.
The statement continued: “Today’s ticketing and entry issues were not the start to the 2021/22 season from a fan experience point of view.”
Liverpool is another club that is continuing to experience ticket entry problems according to reports, as it has recently adopted digital ticketing. These issues continued before the Burnley game at Anfield on Saturday, which saw the home team win 2-0.
The original uptake of NFC technology and mobile ticketing resulted in delays to pre-season games against Osasuna and Athletic Bilbao. Liverpool is partnered with SeatGeek and trialled the NFC technology and ‘Print@Home’ tickets during its pre-season.
Image: Dave Ingham/CC BY-SA 2.0/Edited for size
Share this