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Newcastle United contact corporate fans with scheduled return date to SJP matches

4 years ago
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A new update on the return of Newcastle United fans to St James Park has been revealed in a new report.

Government approved trials are currently being carried out across various sports, with limited numbers of fans allowed in various venues.

The likes of cricket, basketball (Newcastle Eagles are hosting a game later this month with some fans allowed in), horse racing and rugby are involved, as well as football.

Saturday saw the first fans inside a Premier League ground since March, with 2,500 Brighton supporters watching their friendly against Chelsea inside the Amex Stadium.

Now a report from The Mail has revealed that Newcastle United have started contacting corporate fans as they plan for a return of fans to St James Park.

The newspaper report stating that corporate box holders have been told that Saturday 3 October is scheduled to be the first match where Newcastle fans are allowed back in to watch their team, so long as the government approved trials don’t hit significant problems.

Saturday 3 October (unless moved for live TV…) is when Newcastle are set to host Burnley (this follows West Ham away, Brighton home and Spurs away) in their second home match.

Aside from these trials, we already know that no fans will be allowed into matches until October at the earliest and this new report says that the Premier League clubs are ‘increasingly confident’ that supporters will be allowed back in from the beginning of next month.

Previous reports have talked of aiming for around 25% to 30% of capacity initially, however, the author of this Mail report, Craig Hope, says that the ‘Hope is that significantly more than a third of 52,000 [capacity] will be back at St James Park [from early October]’, starting with that Burnley match.

For the corporate box holders, the report states that they have been told to expect half the usual capacity in each box, starting with Burnley on 3 October.

Nobody pretends that any of this is easy and that it will always be a case of making things as safe as possible alongside the need to moving towards some kind of normality.

However, it surely has to be a case of fans being allowed back in as from next month (always obviously with the caveat unless the virus situation got suddenly dramatically worse), just a case of how many will be allowed in initially.

Personally, I definitely can’t see more than those original estimates of between 25% and 30% of capacity for the initial matches where fans will be allowed back in, as caution is bound to be the key thing.

However, I hope I am wrong and as many as possible are allowed back into stadiums.

Then though we have our own special circumstances, as to exactly how many Newcastle fans will actually want to go back to games under current circumstances with Mike Ashley still here.

Ashley ‘succeeded’ in driving 10,000 fans away by last season and had to give away 10,000 free season tickets in December to fill the gaps. What has happened since then in terms of Mike Ashley’s actions, certainly won’t have helped the situation.

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