A key issue which prevents us from selling out is that the club make it very difficult for casual or new fans to buy tickets.
For a number of home games this year, even ones which didn't sell out, tickets never went to true general sale; it was still one ticket per supporter and a minimum number of loyalty points required. For the upcoming Liverpool game, the website states general sale will only apply to supporters with 300 Loyalty Points or above (and one ticket per supporter). So actually it remains very restricted sale.
Underneath this, it states:
Please note: Sheffield United supporters who wish to bring friends and family without a previous purchasing history are advised to set up an account online for the new person attending and then contact the ticket office 0114 253 7200 (Option 1) to have the account activated.
All sales are subject to availability. Only one ticket per customer number is permitted.
If you would like to purchase tickets for family and friends online, you can do this by adding them to your 'family and friends' in the 'Manage my relationships' section, to add existing you will need the customers surname, postcode and customer number alternatively you can register a new customer.
To purchase tickets for family and friends over the telephone or in person please have all their appropriate customer details readily available in order for our operators to quickly find/add them to the ticketing system.
Please be advised that juniors under 14 are not permitted into the stadium unless accompanied by an adult.
The club says that these restrictions are to prevent away supporters purchasing tickets in the home end. I guess they may have been told to do it by South Yorkshire Police? To be fair, I note that for our upcoming home games against Luton, Bournemouth and Brentford the loyalty point requirement has been dropped, presumably because they don't think those teams have large enough fan bases for significant numbers to try and get in the home end. It's still one ticket per supporter though.
The result of all these rules is that if you're, for example, a student or a tourist in Sheffield who wants to go to a game with a group of friends, you have to set up an online account for all of them, providing names, addresses, etc (and actually, in theory they need to set up the account themselves because it needs to be registered to their email address and validated by clicking a link which is emailed to them). You then need to add them as family/ friends on a confusing website before buying the tickets. Or presumably you can do this all in a phone call to the ticket office which will take about 4 hours and still requires you to have all of their personal information to hand. And obviously all this only allows you to buy a ticket for games where there isn't a loyalty point requirement.
Ultimately this is too difficult for many casual and new fans to work out or bother with, and that's why we struggle to add much to our average attendance for big games in the way that other clubs do. For Wembley, I didn't have access to enough customer numbers for all my friends and family who wanted to come, so they didn't, and then there were loads of empty seats. Those people would normally be the types who push other clubs our size to a sell out.
Other clubs don't make it this difficult, and it didn't used to be this difficult at Sheffield United. You used to be able to walk up to the ticket office, or ring up, and buy a few tickets for you and your group (up to a sensible maximum number), no questions asked, and this is still the way it is in much of the country. I'd imagine these restrictions have been put on us by South Yorkshire Police due to their previous high profile failings and our previous crowd trouble- although I don't think our history of crowd problems is significantly worse than the average English club.
Obviously for games that are likely to sell out, it still makes sense to use a loyalty points system to decide who gets priority for buying tickets. But if it's not sold out, it seems crazy that we make it so difficult for ourselves to shift the tickets. Which is why the only explanation I can think of is that the police are insisting on it.
