As an American living in England I admit that I had no clue how big soccer, AKA football is here in Europe until we really started living here. After hearing that people have literally died going to games due to mass stampedes and poor crowd control I began to take it a bit more seriously. Point is, my spouse is a big Manchester United fan and I really wanted to get him tickets for Christmas this year for a game. Before Thomas Cook went under I had looked at buying tickets with them as they were the most reasonable, being able to get a package of 4 tickets and also hotel for about £500. That’s still a LOT of money. Thankfully I didn’t buy the tickets before they went under.
Most third party ticketing sights wanted over £100/ticket, including the tickets for kids which was just crazy expensive it felt (and technically tickets aren’t supposed to be even sold this way so it’s hard to tell which sites are legit). After reading up tons on Reddit and other online sources I came to the conclusion the cheapest way to get tickets was to buy a Manchester United Membership (which I guess is also the way pretty much everyone is SUPPOSED to buy there tickets if they want to be legit), link all our accounts together and then try to get tickets when the window opened. Luckily, the game we wanted to see was midweek and against a not as popular team, Burnley. We chose this game in January because it coincided with a beer festival in Manchester my husband wanted to go to also.
So here’s the steps:
- Buy a Manchester United Membership. I got the Lite Membership because I didn’t care about all the extras. I didn’t want to do Direct Debit so it came out to £80 for my family of 4 (2 adults at £25, 2 under 16’s at £15). You can save £5 per adult membership if you do Direct Debit. After a couple weeks our cards came in the mail, but I was able to book tickets immediately. It was relatively simple to set up all 4 accounts, the kids did need a separate email which was a bit annoying.
- I bought my membership a couple weeks before I saw more tickets were supposed to drop just to make sure things were squared away. I just looked for a game in March though and tickets are still available. We ended up paying £45/per adult ticket and £13/per under 16 ticket. I logged on early though the morning tickets were supposed to drop and had no trouble getting some (this game didn’t sell out). If you want more popular games definitely sign up at the beginning of the season and sign on when tickets open to be able to buy.
- What we didn’t know and I had to call about was that our tickets were linked automatically to our membership card. Also, no bags allowed! Oops! We had been out a lot that day and needed winter weather gear and I thought it was fine, nope. They do have bag storage outside though.
Although they lost horribly it was still a lot of fun, and for the price wasn’t that bad. Would be an even better deal if we wanted to do more games. I just saw there’s still Saturday tickets against Sheffield in March. We could another game for less than £100, not too bad!
Jaunting Around The World 
Wow, way to go. sounds like fun!
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