Blackburn Rovers’ awful away ticket policy cannot be the future of football
Do you remember the Venky’s?
You know, the chicken company which made Blackburn Rovers a laughing stock back in the early 2010s? The owners who scapegoated Steve Kean as a human embodiment of everything wrong with the club that had gone from Premier League winners to the bottom of the table? Who the fans protested against by releasing a chicken onto the Ewood Park pitch during a game?
Given Blackburn have been away from the public eye, you probably think the Venky’s are long gone but oh no, they are still very much there.
Blackburn were relegated in 2012 and fell away from the Premier League microscope but things have only got worse since then.
The Venky’s have ignored Rovers to the point where Ewood Park cannot host a match if it rains more than a light shower and as a sign of how disenfranchised their support has become over more than a decade of mismanagement, they average an attendance of just under 14,000; the stadium holds 31,000.
Rovers fans probably thought it could not get much worse but this summer, the club announced their own version of the Tesco Clubcard – Rovers Rewards.
Football clubs announcing new schemes and memberships is nothing new but when it has a direct impact on being able to see your team live, it is worth more than just those within the Blackburn postcode taking note.
Traditionally, the limited amount of away tickets a club receives has been sold to those with the most points, which you earn by attending matches. It is the fairest way to reward the fans that go to Tranmere and Plymouth should your club ever face Manchester United or Arsenal.
It’s not a perfect system and every fan who has missed out due to not having enough points or ever having an opportunity to get points will have their issues, but can at least admit it is probably the best way of rewarding fans who give up the most time and money to support the team.
Blackburn’s owners, meanwhile, have decided to rip that idea up and instead reward not necessarily those who attend the most matches, but those who spend the most money.
So to Rovers Rewards, which gives points based on purchases you make with the club.
Buying a season ticket would get you 2,500 points. Buying an executive box would net you 3,500. You also get rewarded for attending home matches at 125 a go. Turn up at least 30 minutes before kick-off and you get 50 extra. Attend five matches in a row and it’s 150. Attend them all and it’s 1,500.
You can get points in the club shop, too. Buying the home, away or third shirt will get you 350. Buying all three will get you an additional 500. Which is surely worth the £195 it would cost.
Purchasing anything in the club shop would get you one point per £1 spent. Buying food and drink on the concourse comes with a ‘reward’ of one point per £2.
As to what these points actually mean, well that is not quite clear. In June, the club said it would get you access to high-demand fixtures, away matches, club events and exclusive money-can’t-buy experiences and there are four tiers of loyalty with the highest being the rather sickeningly named Rovers Forever.
Except those fans that have actually been ‘Rovers Forever’ have come to realise that most crucially, these points are being used to determine who can go to away matches.
The club recently announced that for a Rovers fan to buy a ticket to Swansea away, you had to have 4,000 loyalty points to be in the first wave of sales. That figure is 1,500 more than you would have earned for buying a season ticket. You could attend every home game this season and still not reach that mark.
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And with no disrespect to current Championship leaders Swansea, this is not the Nou Camp away.
It is a system designed to reward not loyalty but instead those with the deepest pockets. The Rovers owners don’t care how much money you spend on trains, hotels and petrol or how many years you have been doing so. They want you to spend the money at Ewood Park so it goes into their pocket.
It means that I, an Ipswich fan who has only ever been in the away end at Ewood Park, could have just as much of a chance of getting a ticket as a diehard lifelong fan if I made a single purchase of a season ticket in hospitality.
This may be a cyclical view and maybe it has been done to try and boost the attendance at the rather sorry-looking Ewood Park, but there is a way to do that by not punishing the very fans who have followed the club through an awful lot of thick and thin.
Money decides a lot of things in football but enjoying the unique experience of an away day following your team was one of few that still felt like the game as it is meant to be.
And if you are reading this wondering why you should care about a mid-table Championship side, just you wait until your club unveils something similar and then see how you feel.
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