It is the biggest game to grace York’s new stadium so far – and in the rush for tickets, lots of luckless football fans missed out.
Many loyal supporters were left angry and frustrated after being denied the chance to cheer on York City when they play Boston in the National League North play off final on Saturday.
Some were turned away empty handed after queuing for tickets for an hour or more at the club shop.
Many others found they were bounced off the online ticket store due to technical glitches, only to find no seats left after waiting 30-60 minutes to be logged back in.
York City had promised there would be no cap on the number of tickets available when they went on general sale at 5pm yesterday. But fans repeatedly found they couldn’t order more than two, leaving some family members without tickets.
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Today the club held up its hands, apologised to fans and said: “This will not happen again”.
The club said more than 2,500 tickets were sold to season ticket holders who were allowed to purchase up to two tickets each a day early.
“At 5pm the next day when tickets went on general sale, we experienced an unexpected demand with website queues of over an hour for online sales and a physical line down towards the supermarkets at the LNER Community Stadium,” the club said in a statement.
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“This led to the temporary suspension of online sales to serve those waiting in person and the remaining tickets were sold out in under an hour.
“No general sale tickets were sold before 5pm.”
The full allocation of home tickets – after the Safety Advisory Group demanded 1,000 seats were cut – was about 6,700. The average home gate is less than half that.
The club is looking at other options they can put in place before future high-profile games “to allow us to allocate tickets fairly”.
“We’d like to extend our apologies to anyone who was missed out on tickets yesterday,” the club said.
“We do not believe anyone thought that we would be in the position of a sell-out crowd in our first season at the LNER Community Stadium, so we thank you for your incredible support.”
The National League has also confirmed that the game will be Livestreamed via a pay-per-view platform.