Yeah, it is fair. They had the chance to renew. If people didn’t have the money I have sympathy for them, however I would caveat that by saying season tickets go on sale same time each year pretty much, so it can’t have been a shock to find out they were on sale! Plus that week leading up to the Ipswich game saw loads of media about the sales etc so no one can say they didn’t know and I believe there was a spread the payment scheme available.
Even if people missed the deadline and there was still season tickets available, it’d be a first come first served situation, can’t reserve seats on the off chance someone will eventually renew, when others are wanting to buy seats.
There is a cap on number of season tickets (can’t remember the figure) as a certain number of tickets need to be made available for each home game to non ST holders (it’s in PL rule book). So by that cut off date in April united had obviously sold the max number of season tickets, not much else they could do