Chris Heck - President of Business Operations

[Risso]

39,978 is on a few pages now. That is dreadful, frankly.

[FrankyH]

39,978 is on a few pages now. That is dreadful, frankly.

Yep , and that lies at the door of one employee of Aston Villa Football Club.

[PeterWithesShin]

I'm not convinced that's right. 39,978 was our attendance v Wolves 4th Jan 2023. Seems a hell of a coincidence to have exactly the same again against the same side when that's our lowest PL attendance since promotion, barring covid obviously.

[Risso]

Well that's the figure on the BBC now as well. Coincidence or not, there were loads of empty seats, and so 2Kish off feels about right.

[Rudy Can't Fail]

Yeah but Heck makes it up as he goes along. "Another "amazing success". Go Heck!

[Brend'Watkins]

39,978 is on a few pages now. That is dreadful, frankly.

Yep , and that lies at the door of one employee of Aston Villa Football Club.

On the face of it yes. Heck will be looking at gate receipts and all the add ons to determine if it’s that bad. Assume it’s a loss of £100k on gate receipts alone, will the hospitality packages make up the shortfall?

[Dogtanian]

But queues at the turnstiles aren't remotely defensible, and nor is the attitude of "well get there earlier then."

People should get there, have a fucking think about how the ticket works beforehand and be ready.

It's the equivalent of being in a supermarket and the person in front starts scrabbling around in their handbag looking for the exact change, or the person at the ATM who checks their balance, checks their balance on another card, goes back to the first card and fucks about holding everyone else up.

This will all be forgotten soon enough when people learn how to do it. We're not the only club doing it this way, and surely it's not much to ask people to be prepared?

I've used contactless tickets at Villa for years and not been held up, tap and go. It's the way the world is going.

What the club should have done of course, is help everyone, have stewards checking phones were ready before people got to the turnstile and sorted it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work that out. The club fucked it up.

If it was that simple, I have IT qualifications so I have no problem with getting my phone ready to go through the turnstiles as I did with 0 problems at the Everton match but when I did the exact same thing against Wolves it took 3 attempts. In my opinion this isn't a user error this is quite clearly a rubbish system that Villa are using.

Pretty sure your IT qualifications will swiftly be revoked if your first response isn’t ‘user error’. 

[artvandelay]

You clearly chosen to live in Canada and don’t bother going to games. You’ve insulted me because my grandma had the audacity to die, what else would you like to work perfectly? Any apology?

[Toronto Villa]

You clearly chosen to live in Canada and don’t bother going to games. You’ve insulted me because my grandma had the audacity to die, what else would you like to work perfectly? Any apology?

I didn’t know where to start with that. I’m sorry your grandma died. You didn’t give the impression you still went to the game and arrived when you did because of a family tragedy. As for me living in Canada. Well yeh I do. What that has to do with anything I have no idea.

[Risso]

It doesn't matter what the reason is though. People have busy lives, and should be able to get into a game 20 minutes before kick off, like they always used to.

[London Villan]

Without getting too forensic about this, but wasn't one of the contributing factors to Hillsborough a lack of capacity at the turnstiles which caused a dangerous build-up of fans outside the stadium. Fast forward to the Champions League final a couple of years ago when Liverpool fans again had issues with the capacity of turnstiles.

The problems at Villa Park this season have been when the weather is good too - imagine standing outside for 40 minutes in the freezing rain - hardly ideal for younger and older fans, even more so when the previous system worked efficiently.

It's another backward step by the club.

[dave.woodhall]

As the late, great John Handley said about the introduction of season cards, "We didn't do it first because we wanted other clubs to make the mistakes." This should have been tested, tested and tested again until we made sure it works, well before the first match.

[PeterWithe]

The queues stuff will ease in a few games, what wont get better is the feeling that once again, the club have introduced this to take something away from us. The ability to pass on tix easily if we cant go.

[Nev]

I never have much of a problem accessing the UH (Trinity Road side) but, and I pointed this out before the start of the season, there were always large queues for the lower and across Trinity Road for the LT before the introduction of the new technology. So it may actually be a question of turnstile capacity with the added complication of electronic ST's.

As for arriving early, the concourse in the UH is particularly inhospitable. Always freezing in the winter and that's before you mention the poor catering so I'm happy to spend the least amount of time there as possible. The Fan Zone(s) just don't appeal so I'll stay in the pub. Which is precisely why the club don't want me. My commitment to a ST is not nearly enough and eventually I'll stop going and they can charge someone three times the price for my seat, the problem with that is the lack of market which we are seeing now.....Birmingham, and in particular, Aston is not London however well we do on the pitch.

[Dogtanian]

Isn't there a Premier League requirement for all clubs to introduce it within the next two years or something?