Bangitintrnet wrote: January 23rd, 2024, 1:58 pm
The online system to purchase tickets can handle 10's of thousands at one time. The fact that thousands thousands hadn't signed up to it as detailed in the step by step instructions titled 'MU tickets how to purchase', and then complained that they couldn't get tickets, is a problem for them.
The argus had an article detailing that it took three quarters of an hour to sell out, with 12000 on the site.
Once your ticket is in the basket you have a maximum of 5 minutes to purchase including verification with your bank. It can be tight, even if you are doing it in a normal non pressing situation like I did for my Eastleigh tickets and others.
You do the maths, how many sales could have been made to 12000 people every 5 minutes? The fact that it wasn't sold out in 5 minutes, had precisely nothing to do with the amount of tickets left, however convinced you are.
Incidently, how many of the queue on Thursday stayed queing unrealistically, in the belief that the club would be lying about the sales closing at 7pm? Were the ridiculous accusations made when Kevin Ward showed how to queue easily, a factor used to justify staying unrealistically?
As someone who was on the site seconds after it went live in General Sale (the Man U ticket part of the site clearly opened about 09:52 when my position in the queue quickly dropped from around position 1000 to being in the site within seconds), and there about 100 "active" seats showing as recently available but not actually available at that moment (ie set up on the system for someone to purchase that day, but already in the process of being sold - in light blue, rather than "not available" grey). I saw *one* in dark blue showing as still available right at the start, none for the 15 minutes after that when I hung around to see if anything was released after the 5 minute basket payment timeouts.
While they might in theory have been able to sell 12000 simultaneously - there weren't 12000 to sell, nor should there have been. And FWIW I had a FB chat with the guy who wrote the Argus article, his "sold out" time was when County announced it, not when the tickets stopped being available, which was nearly half an hour earlier judging by the different responses from the site at different times. He did a bit of "research" by logging in himself, but it wasn't really reflected in the article.
What seems to have been missed though is that having as few tickets go to General Sale as possible is the best way to prevent touts getting them anyway. The allocations to ST and Trust Members were clearly designed to allow people regarded as trustworthy to allocate them to others as they saw fit (otherwise no-one, no matter how much they were putting into the club, would have been allowed more than one for themselves). Some will have abused that, but they're traceable to the purchaser as an ST holder/Trust Member, which isn't the case with mass-scale touting operations buying up General Sale tickets.
The site and queue was also most likely swarming with bots by 1015, when there were supposedly 13800+ "people" in the queue (source: wife took a screenshot at 10:12), despite anyone who'd made it onto the site not being able to navigate to the seating plan to buy any tickets by then (this was the case by 1013).
The process wasn't without its flaws. There probably should have been a Trust Members only window which didn't require queuing in person. As the club don't own the data on Trust Membership I would imagine they couldn't use that to set up an online solution due to GDPR even if they wanted to - so a day of just fielding Trust Member (in theory) phone calls might have been useful. Still issues there with verification of membership on the phone, as, again, GDPR could be an issue, given that its very nature means (pretty much) that you can't share data that identifies someone without explicit consent.
Season Ticket holders who decided to stand in a queue for hours though when a few clicks on a phone or PC when there were no queues at all would have done the same job... not enough facepalms.
