Got any spare tickets?

It's that time of year again. The sun is shining, everyone is getting ready for summer...and there's a row about FA Cup Final ticketing. Just like last year. And the year before that. And...well, you get the picture.

 So, is it true that fans of Arsenal and Hull City are being short-changed? Or is it an unavoidable part of modern sport? Let's find out.



Firstly, we should look at what the Football Association have had to say. The FA are in charge of ticketing for the Cup Final, and have argued that the allocation is no different to previous years. If we look back to 2007, the first Final at the new Wembley, this would appear to be correct.

Right or wrong, ever since the Cup Final has been held at the new Wembley, around 50,000 tickets have gone to the two clubs involved, with just under 20,000 to the "football family", i.e. the county associations, clubs and officials at all levels and volunteers. Hospitality, known as Club Wembley, accounts for the remaining tickets. Of course, as we all know Wembley cost a lot more than expected and so even if the FA was minded to reduce the level of hospitality seats, it is highly unlikely to do so. The FA made a big point that more tickets could be allocated to fans at the new national stadium, and it is true that 1,500 more tickets have been given to each club since the Finals at the Millennium Stadium. But if we look at the number of tickets as a share of the overall seats:

We can see immediately that in Cardiff, fans made up 66% of the ticket allocation, as opposed to the 56% at Wembley. So is it the new stadium that has caused this share to drop so dramatically? After all, it was partially funded through schemes such as debentures and 10 year seats, so perhaps it is inevitable that we have to cut fans' share?

Apparently not. Despite the demands of Club Wembley and others, the Football League were able to release an extra 13,000 tickets to the two clubs who competed in this year's League Cup Final. And for the richest match in sport, well over 80% of tickets went to the two clubs involved. So it seems like we can't really blame Wembley.

That's all well and good you might say, but the FA Cup is a considerably higher profile competition than the League Cup or the second division. In fact, it is in the FA's own words the "oldest and best" domestic cup competition in the world. It's so important, it must be shown on terrestrial TV, along with other Category A events such as the World Cup, the Olympics and Wimbledon. So could it be said that such massive events will inevitably mean neutrals will get a larger share of the tickets? Let's see.

Ticket information for many of our biggest sporting events is difficult to come by, especially as a lot of them (such as Wimbledon, major horse races, golf, boxing etc.) do not involve two distinct teams. However, if we look at Rugby Union's premier cup competition, the Heineken Cup, we can see that the proportions are much better than for the Cup Final. Due to tickets going on sale early, many are on open sale rather than sold to clubs directly but over 75% are available to fans to buy directly. A similar proportion go to the equivalent of the "football family" in terms of the International and European bodies overseeing the final, but a far smaller proportion are given to hospitality. In fact, even if we look at the Olympics, often criticised for pandering to corporate hospitality, we can see a similar pattern:

For what is the show-piece event, the 100 metre Men's Final, we can still see 75% of tickets going to the general public. The figures are similar when we look at other international occasions. So maybe it's just football that has the problem? Well, let's look at how some other European nations divide up their respective Cup Finals' tickets.

Hmmm - in Germany, Spain and Scotland the proportion of fans' tickets is considerably higher - and we should bear in mind that these are all played in stadiums smaller than Wembley. In fact, I could only find one major sporting event that resembled FA Cup Finals in how few tickets are given to the average supporter, although even there fans got 68% overall, compared to 56% in the FA Cup:

So there you have it. FA Cup Final tickets are actually harder to get hold of than Champions League Final tickets...