With the excitement of Monday’s Playoff match at fever pitch, and overwhelming interest in the game from the media, league officials, away fans, players and the general public, there has been exponential demand for Playoff Final tickets leading to the game being a sell-out.      

With ground capacity agreed with the police and league authorities, there is a finite number of tickets available and this means that unfortunately, we cannot cater for the tremendous demand from fans to attend the match. As a club, our focus and primary goal is to ensure as many of our fans as possible can witness the game. We have instigated a transparent ticket allocation process to ensure that the distribution is fair to all concerned. Whilst the majority of fans have received their tickets, we recognise and regret that some loyal fans may inevitably miss out on purchasing match tickets.

However, whilst club volunteers are working hard behind the scenes, contacting individuals and working through the requests for information and tickets, there has been a lot of speculation on various online forums concerning the ticketing process. To address these comments, we are taking this opportunity to directly address the speculation and, whilst we appreciate this will not make up for the hurt for some of not getting a ticket, we hope the context will help understand how decisions have been made.

With the exception of season ticket holders, there is currently no alternative method for recognising loyalty of one fan over another. If everyone purchased tickets in advance of each match via the ticketing Fanbase app, we could have staggered the sales process by opening up successive sales windows according to your level of ‘loyalty’ in terms of games attended. As it is, if we had have done that, we would have instantly excluded our many loyal supporters that turn up every week and pay cash on the turnstile. Therefore, this sale process had only 2 priority groups defined as follows:

1. Season Ticket Holders 
2. Any fan that has purchased at least once via Fanbase. The logic here was that you could only purchase semi-final tickets on Fanbase (and we encouraged people to do so for the Banbury match as well) so most would have had at least one transaction. Setting the limit at one ticket also meant we would not be subjected to Telford fans signing up and trying to purchase tickets in the home end.

For full transparency, we had given some of our fans that struggle to access the internet the option of purchasing tickets in person for the semi-final and therefore, had to re-open this opportunity for them again ahead of the final else they would have been excluded from any potential route to a ticket.

The simple truth is that demand far outstripped supply for this game unfortunately, and with no reliable loyalty scheme in place, it was impossible to prioritise sales beyond season ticket holders. Many genuine fans have secured tickets and obviously, it is fantastic for the club to have such high interest illustrating how successful this season has been.

This summer we will launch details of a membership or loyalty scheme that will help to solve these issues in future as well as investigating the option of allowing season ticket purchases to be staggered over a number of instalments to ease financial burden of buying one.

For now, however, we ask the following:

• If anyone has spare tickets, please email the club at info@ketteringtownfc.com before 10am on Monday and we will try to ensure they get to deserving fans
• Stay vigilant against scammers as unfortunately, there are already a lot of fake accounts on Facebook offering promises of tickets.
• Please report any instances of people asking for above face value for tickets as  we can, and will, cancel any orders that are found to be re-sold at a higher value.

Please be kind and remember that volunteers largely run our club that all do a fantastic job in difficult circumstances. We will not tolerate abuse of any kind against anyone connected with the club.

FAQs

• Did Fanbase crash? Fanbase did not crash it was just dealing with a huge demand for a limited number of tickets that sold incredibly quickly.

• Why allow 5 tickets per transaction?  We set the limit at 5 to recognise that we are a family friendly club and wanted families to be able to attend as they usually do. Interestingly, despite the limit being 5, the average number of tickets purchased was 2.8 so most people did show respect and only purchase what they needed for their own needs.

• Why didn’t we run the same process as our FA Cup games?  We had a lead time of just two weeks for each big cup tie. For the Playoff matches we had only 2 days when most club volunteers were also working their actual day jobs. We simply could not organise the production of a secure print run and then distribute that many tickets in the time we had. It is also worth noting that we effectively used the same process that worked so well for the semi final when it took a couple of days to fully sell out.

• Have Telford fans bought home end tickets? We are very confident this is not the case for three reasons:

• 1) Restriction placed on having to have purchased once already this season. 
•  2) Those Telford fans that did purchase tickets for the league match here earlier in the season were segregated into an away end with a different category of ticket so it made it easy to identify them and remove them from being able to purchase.
• 3) We have double checked this by again checking these names against actual tickets purchased.

• How did tickets sell so quickly? Our average home league match attendance this season has been 1,332 but the actual number of unique fans that have attended a fixture will be much higher. It is only natural that interest in the final is high and everyone is therefore clamouring for tickets. 

We hope that the above goes some way to explaining the ticketing process and the decisions made to ensure that they are distributed in a fair and transparent manner.

Wherever you watch or listen to the match, get behind the team and let’s hope for the right result on Bank Holiday Monday. COYP!