Last month the club ran a 90 Minutes Session to review the current away priority points system, which has run for many years, and discuss ideas around potential revisions.
Board members Sarah Hubbard and Kate Thompson represented the Foxes Trust for this hybrid meeting, which was the best attended this season, with over 50 fans present. Imogen Ward and Jim Donnelly represented the club.
While the club stated its intention to look after long-standing supporters, one of the main criticisms of the current system is every season ticket holder being allocated 50 points per season when many rarely attend away games, as this results in members attending every away game falling further behind season ticket holders in the priority points bands season on season.
An initial proposal was put forward to revise the allocation of 50 points to season ticket holders per season down to 19 (based on 1 point per home game, if in the Premier League) starting from next season.
Members would also be allocated one point for each home or away game attended.
There were discussions on how many years should qualify on a rolling years basis.
A comparison was made with the Chelsea system, who allocate 5 points to season ticket holders, 1 point for attending a “Top 6 (assume this means the Big 6)” away game, 2 points for attending other weekend away games and 3 points for midweek games.
The majority of attendees at the meeting were in favour of further random ID checks being carried out for away games to prevent sales being made to fans who are buying tickets and then selling them on just to earn the points, it is not feasible to check every away ticket.
Fans sharing their season tickets with friends to enable them to buy tickets was also discussed, with the concept of club registered linked accounts and the potential to pool their points to allow different family members to attend away games, so the system was more family friendly.
There was also a discussion about creating a separate points system for children, as its very complicated to access tickets when the adult has a high level of priority points, but children will naturally have few points.
Once the formal meeting ended, the Foxes Trust discussed being keen to be presented with a few options from the club to survey our members.
The various ideas generated will be discussed further at the Fans Consultative Committee Working Group Meeting on April 30th, with proposals finalised for review by the Fans Advisory Board in May.
If you would like to give your views on this topic, then contact us enquiries@foxestrust.co.uk