The Emirates Stadium management is a shambles and needs sorting now

By Tony Attwood

Arsenal can be proud of the Emirates Stadium. I’ve not been to every single Premier League ground, but I’ve been to most, and most of the Championship, plus many lower league grounds, and even with the Arsenal-tint to my eyes reduced to the lowest possible level I can say it is the best.  The best inside and the best outside.

But… it is declining.

Being the best does not mean that you don’t have problems – and the longer the problems exist the more it looks like there is a lack of care within the club about what these days marketing people who lack a certain grasp of the finer points of the language call “the match day experience”.

Yes, at the Ems, the “match day experience” is good.  But it could be better, and as problems are left unresolved and the decline sets in, the failure to address obvious issues speaks poorly of Arsenal.

Some of the things that are wrong with the Ems I have spoken of before, and although they are perhaps the most pressing, because I have mentioned them earlier I will leave them until last.

So here, without any thought to the relative importance of each notion, is the list of ten of the things that are wrong at the Ems.

1.  The sound system failed in the lower north bank early last season – and was left without repair

Now what does that say about “match day experience”?  What does that say about the repair team?

Electronics and digital systems go wrong – we all know that.  But there are such people as engineers whose job it is to fix stuff.  Where the attitude is, “oh it doesn’t matter, it’s only the fans” it gets harder and harder to justify the cost of the tickets.

2.  Parking supporters’ coaches on the streets outside the stadium is ludicrous.

Around 55,000 people leave the stadium at once at the end of the game and the streets are jammed with pedestrians.  The streets are closed – which is sensible although it is bad enough that in the gloom we have to dodge manure, delicately deposited by police horses.  But it works – until we have to try and negotiate the streets filled with coaches and supporters trying to find which coach they should be on.

It doesn’t happen every game – it happens when there is no public transport available and away fans come by coach instead of train.

So, first off, if there really is nowhere to park all those hundreds of coaches other than in the streets around the ground, if we are drawn at home on January 1, or the TV stations try to move the game to January 1, we should appeal on the grounds of safety.

Likewise, if there are to be more strikes on the Underground, let’s implement that change too.  No railways, no underground, don’t play.

3: Stop treating older supporters like second class citizens.

The UK started to treat its senior citizens with dignity and respect by introducing state benefits for older members of the community just over 100 years ago.  It was a bit of a no-brainer – in later years one slows down, and generally has less money yet one has (in most cases) paid taxes to support the state.  Now its pay back time.

In response to this every club in the Premier League allows senior citizens who are season ticket holders to keep their season tickets, but have a discount – which is a proper response to a recognition of a lifetime of supporting the club.

That is every club, except Arsenal.   Arsenal say, oh yes, you can have a discount – but you have to move and sit with the children!

Now you might think that outrageous, and possibly too stupid to be true – but it is absolutely true.  Any senior supporter who asks for a discount is told to move into the family enclosure with the kids and their parents.   The dignity of the elderly – some of whom don’t actually want to stand, or jump up and down through a game, but who want to sit with their friends – is gone.

It is a disgraceful attitude for Arsenal to hold.

And it is not even one that can be justified financially, since surveys of other clubs show that the number of senior supporters who take season tickets is normally just a few hundred.  These are people who have supported the club through the years that the “nine years without a trophy” merchants can’t imagine.  They watched the team play under Billy Wright for God’s sake.  And yet they stayed with the club.

Then they are rewarded like this.

4.  Stop the Stewards blocking the gangways.

I normally take my seat a few minutes before the start of the game – and every time I find I have to edge my way around stewards standing at the top of the gangway having a natter.

Maybe it is necessary to have one steward standing watching people coming up the stairs – but why does he/she…

a) have to have a little friend to talk to during the long and lonely half an hour he/she is on duty

b) have to stand exactly in a position that everyone has to edge around in order to continue up to the seats?

5.  The sound system outside the ground for the Bergkamp statue day was ludicrous and heads should roll over that fiasco.

Walter did a superb piece on this site reporting what was said in the speeches and what was utterly clear was that no one, but no one, thought of the fans.  No one even bothered to check the sound system.  No one thought, “hey, maybe these people who spend thousands of pounds a year on Arsenal deserve a little bit of thought, so they can hear their hero.”

No one thought at all!

And that’s really the problem, isn’t it?

6.  The queues for drinks at half time are still ludicrous.

There is space to put many more locations where a single product can be purchased – and this would reduce the queues.

Let’s say that the club know that a very large number of fans want pints of a certain type of lager and nothing else at half time.  Then set up places where

a) they only sell that product

b) the purchasers need to have the exact money – no change is given.

Those queues would move incredibly quickly, and the queues for all the other products would diminish.

It’s not that hard.

7.  Train the catering staff before they work, not during working time.

Something like 50% of my purchases at half time last season met either with a cock-up, laughter, disbelief or uncertainty.  And most of the time I was only trying to buy a coffee.

And here’s another catering issue – if the product is not available, put up a big sign, so that I don’t spend the whole of half time queuing for a coffee that is not available at the place I was queuing.

8.  Merseyside supporters and supporters of overseas clubs will let off flares and smoke bombs and the stewards will not be able to deal with it.

Not only do the supporters conspire together to bring flares and smoke bombs into the stadium, they also conspire to stop stewards getting to the objects, and the supporters letting them off.

We saw the particularly pathetic sight last season of stewards trying to push past standing away supporters, but being unable to do so, and of two or three times having to try and fight their way into a particular part of the ground without success.

In other words, during matches involving Merseyside clubs parts of the Ems becomes a no-go area.

Eventually someone will get hurt, and this warning on this blog will become part of the public record.  The club really needs to act now, and if it is not possible to check everyone, or to gain access to some of the away section, then they need to do the most obvious thing – reduce the number of Merseyside and overseas club supporters allowed into the stadium at any one time.

9:  Violence is possible at the game against Tottenham

The violence shown by a number of Tottenham fans against Theo and the ambulance crews was disturbing, worrying and dangerous.  There is a long history of Tottenham having a small number of fans who will constantly break the law – just think back to September 28 2008 at Fratton Park.  As a result of that a dozen of the hundreds of guilty Tottenham supporters were identified as having broken the law, and were charged.

But the worrying point about that event, apart from its abhorrent nature, is that it took photographs of Tottenham supporters in the national press for the individuals to be identified.

What this suggests is that people could then, and I think can still now, buy Tottenham away tickets without giving their identity through club membership.  This leads to a feeling of impunity when this group throw objects at a player and ambulance crews.

Something needs to be done, or else like the Merseyside flares, it will happen again.

10: Many of these problems show an on-going lack of care and consideration for Arsenal fans.

That’s the inherent point in all this.  Yes we want to win the League, and yes that is more important than sorting out amplification systems etc.  But even so.  It ain’t that hard.  Is it?

So why doesn’t someone either a) sort this lot or b) tell us why these issues can’t be sorted?

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