Over 10,000 Newcastle v Brighton tickets unsold for tomorrow – Lowest ever Mike Ashley crowd?

On 12 September I counted up the number of unsold Newcastle v Brighton tickets nine days ahead of the the home game at St James Park.

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.

Back on 12 September, there were 8,948 unsold Newcastle v Brighton tickets in normal home ticketing areas.

Today I repeated the exercise and at 12 noon on Friday 20 September there were 8,022 unsold Newcastle v Brighton tickets in normal home ticketing areas.

In the last eight days only 926 tickets sold according to the official NUFC ticketing site.

The breakdown being (in brackets are the numbers that had been left unsold by the 12 September):

East Stand – 424 (552) seats available

Gallowgate East Corner – 81 (126) seats available

Gallowgate Stand – 1,476 (1,661) seats available

Gallowgate West Corner – 279 (368) seats available

Leazes Stand – 1,894 (1,623) seats available (It appears the club have released extra tickets for sale in the Leazes)

Leazes East Corner – 590 (676) seats available

Leazes West Corner – 1,355 (1,539) seats available

Milburn Stand – 1,923 (2,403) seats available

For tomorrow, as well as the 8,022 unsold in the home areas, a quick check of the official Brighton website shows that they have sold only around a thousand of the maximum 3,200 away fans can buy, meaning at least another seats are unsold on top of the 8,022.

Altogether at least 10,000 unsold and that is before you get to how many of the approximately 4,000 corporate seats Mike Ashley hasn’t been able to sell.

An unknown number of season ticket holds are also set to give the game a miss but they will still be counted in the official attendance, although that official attendance now looks guaranteed to set a new low for this season, ‘beating’ the official attendance of 44,157 for Watford. Over 8,000 empty seats although many fans who did go to the match, felt there was probably less than figure at the game.

The lowest ever Premier League Newcastle home crowd since Mike Ashley came in, was the 41,053 that turned up to see NUFC lose 2-1 to Blackburn on Wednesday 10 November 2010.

Mike Ashley himself has been boycotting games at St James Park so far this season, so interesting to see if he adds his considerable weight to try and fill a seat or two to make up the shortfall.