Arsenal accused of ‘misleading’ fans with ‘fake’ attendance figures

Arsenal have been accused of deliberately trying to mislead fans by withholding attendance figures at the Emirates Stadium while releasing the bloated number of tickets sold.
The Gunners were officially watched by 59,692 fans as they beat Hull City thanks to an Alexis Sanchez brace, just 663 short of the stadium’s maximum capacity.
But many times more than 663 seats appeared vacant as the game was played out with the Arsenal Supporters Trust claiming as many as 10,000 may have been absent despite holding tickets.
A spokesperson for the organisation says Arsenal’s insistence on releasing the figure for tickets sold rather than actual attendance is a conscious effort to mislead their own fan base.
‘They’re deliberately misleading people because they use the word attendance and it’s clearly not attendance,’ an AST spokesperson said.
‘What they’re giving you is tickets sold. They do know what the [real] attendance figure is and sometimes we’re able to get hold of it.
‘It’s obviously guess work using the naked eye but I could tell it was around 50,000 [against Hull] because I know what was recorded for previous games and could work out the equivalent.
‘The club ought to stop hiding behind a fake attendance and start addressing the real reasons.’
While there is no confirmation that 10,000 seats were empty, a combination of contempt after back-to-back defeats, the low key opposition and temperatures barely above freezing convinced a significant portion of fans to stay away.
But there are, of course, only so many anti-Wenger fans who actually decide to stay away while contributing factors like the weather will always be out of Arsenal’s control.
The AST claim that the club are avoiding the problems caused by a so-called ‘corporate fan base’, with many wealthy enough to pay for expensive season tickets firm in the knowledge that they will only attend the bigger matches.
‘You’ve got to reward people for coming to more games’, the spokesperson continued. ‘Perhaps they get priority cup final tickets or a slight discount on the season ticket next year. There are various things.
‘What Bayern Munich do, if there are season ticket holders that are regularly not showing then the following year you don’t get the right to renew it because you’re not coming to support the team.’