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Number of Newcastle v Brighton tickets unsold – Lowest Premier League crowd of season?

5 years ago
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I have been looking at the number of unsold Newcastle v Brighton tickets ahead of the next home game at St James Park.

The opening day of the season saw fans asked to support a one game boycott even if they were season ticket holders and the official crowd was announced as 47,635 but estimates of actual people inside St James Park ranged from 42,000 to 45,000, I reckon it was probably around the 44,000 mark, with a few thousand ST holders also boycotting the match.

The match against Watford was always going to give us a better idea of what is going to be the bottom line this season and that was an official attendance of 44,157. Over 8,000 empty seats although many fans who did go to the match, felt there was probably less than figure at the game.

Arsenal provided relatively attractive opposition for both Newcastle fans and neutrals, whilst Watford was clearly the other end of the spectrum, with obviously Brighton on a similar kind of level of interest as Watford.

An official attendance of 22,707 against Leicester in the League Cup was five thousand down on the last League Cup home game two seasons ago (losing 3-2 to Forest), yet again those at the game thought even that lowly figure looked less than credible, with it looking far less than 20,000 inside St James Park, many people estimating it having been closer to 15,000.

The club’s online ticketing website shows details of all the sections of St James Park, which allows fans to pick their Newcastle v Brighton tickets.

What that also allows is somebody to then count up how many are still unsold for each.

I went around every section to total them up, you didn’t need to count the seats one by one, there is a total of unsolds for each section.

So today at 12 noon (on Thursday 12 September) the unsold Newcastle v Brighton tickets in normal home ticketing areas were:

East Stand – 552 seats available

Gallowgate East Corner – 126 seats available

Gallowgate Stand – 1,661 seats available

Gallowgate West Corner – 368 seats available

Leazes Stand – 1,623 seats available

Leazes East Corner – 676 seats available

Leazes West Corner – 1,539 seats available

Milburn Stand – 2,403 seats available

By my calculations, that adds up to at least 8,948 unsold Newcastle v Brighton tickets in normal ticketing areas.

In counting up empty seats, you can’t access the unsold areas where away fans would normally be.

Watford actually brought a few more than expected with 1,300 travelling fans, a look at the Brighton official website tickets section shows they have sold less than a thousand tickets.

They never bring many and with it being 5.30pm live on TV, no surprise they will bring so few, leaving another 2,000+ empty seats in the away end.

The lowest ever (*Since St James Park was expanded to 52,000+ in 2000) Premier League Newcastle home crowd so far, was the 41,053 that turned up to see NUFC lose 2-1 to Blackburn on Wednesday 10 November 2010.

With around 11,000 tickets unsold in the normal home and away areas nine days before the game, you have to then also factor in how many tickets of the 4,000 or so seats in corporate areas the club have managed to shift.

However, with it being a Saturday late afternoon/early night kick-off, you could find a sizeable number of season ticket holders not fancying the travel, especially with it being on TV, and/or find they have something better to do on a Saturday night than watching Newcastle in the flesh.

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