Just received an email from EST1960 who is completely mythed by the price of tickets for this Saturday’s visit of Stockport. To quote from the email he says “..how on earth is Stockport a CAT A game? It’s £26 for the cheapest tickets so I’m having to pay £78 for me and my two sons!”

I get quite a few emails from fans and pricing is a common theme, but EST1960 raises a good point here which is the catergory decision for Stockport. Catergory A would usually suggest a big fixture against one of our fellow title-contendors, or at least some kind of rival, but Stockport are neither. They flirted with relegation last season and aren’t doing too well this time round either. For me, they’re a catergory C fixture or B at the absolute maximum.

It’s interesting to see the arrangements for the Liverpool game. If you aren’t a season ticket holder or member, then the only way you can get a ticket is by producing a ticket from the Stockport game. There’s no way Bates could have predicted a draw against Liverpool beforehand but it’ll certainly raise the attendance this weekend now.

I’ve never taken much notice of the catergory listings for games as I hold a season ticket, but from what I’m told it’s not uncommon for teams of no real significance to be deemed a catergory A game. I’ve been thinking about this for much of the day now and can’t come up with any justification at all for how Stockport could be considered catergory A. For me, there’s only 3 or 4 teams in this division I’d class as catergory A games and Stockport wouldn’t come close.

Surely it makes more sense for Ken to keep the prices down and attract more people? If you charged an average price of £20 for tickets and got 30,000 in this would equate to roughly the same as 23,000 paying £26 and a bigger attendance means more money spent on merchandise and refreshments. There’s no way of saying whether 30,000 would turn up with them prices but even if it was only an extra 2-3,000 you’d make the extra revenue on sales within the ground.

My major qualm with Elland Road ticket prices remains the empty seats. There’s no point having empty seats at all. Even if we gave them away to school kids for free it’d be better than them being unused and it’d also increase revenue with the kids spending money within the ground. It’d also welcome the next generation of Leeds fans into Elland Road who will one day be the ones paying to see the Whites play.

Prices quoted are the cheapest seats in the North and South stands.