How to Get Away End Tickets at English Football Clubs
Away end tickets in England, explained — how to get away tickets English football clubs allocate, loyalty points, ballots, price caps and ID at collection.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Grounds & Matchday20 min read
- Premier League away ticket cap
- £30
- FA Cup away allocation
- 15% of capacity
- EFL away allocation
- around 10% of capacity
- Unauthorised resale
- A criminal offence since 1994
The Premier League handbook obliges a home club to make seats available to the visiting club whether it wants to or not, and sets the figure at three thousand or ten per cent of the stadium's capacity, whichever of the two is the smaller. The "smaller" is doing most of the work in that sentence. At a ground holding sixty thousand, ten per cent would be six thousand, so the entitlement stops at three thousand. At a ground holding twenty-four thousand, ten per cent is two thousand four hundred, and that lower number becomes the allocation. The rule is a floor for the away club at a big stadium and a ceiling at a small one.
That is where the league's involvement ends. The block arrives with your club, and everything that decides whether you personally get one of those seats — the membership requirement, the points threshold, the ballot, the collection window — is set by your own club's ticket office under its own policy. English football has no national away ticketing scheme. It has around a hundred and twenty separate ones.
The minimum allocation is a floor, not a promise
Three competitions, three different numbers, and they matter more than most supporters realise when a fixture is announced.
| Competition | Away entitlement | Practical effect |
|---|---|---|
| Premier League | 3,000 seats or 10% of capacity, whichever is lower | 3,000 at the large grounds, 10% at the smaller ones |
| EFL Championship, League One, League Two | Around 10% of capacity | Varies widely with ground size and segregation |
| FA Cup, first round proper onwards | 15% of capacity | Noticeably larger away ends than the same tie in a league season |
The FA's Cup rules are the most generous of the three, and it shows. An away following at a Cup tie will frequently occupy a block the same supporters have never had access to in a league fixture at the same ground, which is one of the quiet reasons Cup away days feel different. The away club is not obliged to take the full fifteen per cent, and returns unsold tickets by a stated deadline.
None of these figures is untouchable. Every English ground with a substantial capacity operates under a safety certificate issued by the local authority under the Safety of Sports Grounds Act 1975, and grounds in the top two divisions are also licensed by the Sports Grounds Safety Authority. The ground's safety officer, working with the police and the local Safety Advisory Group, can cut an away allocation where segregation cannot be maintained, where the only available block has sightline problems, or where a fixture has been assessed as high risk. Supporters read a reduced allocation as a slight from the home club. It is more often the safety certificate and a police risk assessment.
The reverse happens too, and gets less attention. A home club with spare capacity and a well-supported visitor will often sell an extra block beyond the minimum, because empty seats generate nothing. This is common in the EFL, common in the early rounds of the cups, and effectively unheard of at a sold-out Premier League fixture.
How loyalty points are actually earned
A loyalty point is a number on your account that says you turned up. That is the whole idea, and every complication after it comes from clubs trying to stop the number being gamed.
The commonest structure awards a point for each away league match attended, sometimes with a bonus for the longest journeys or for cup ties that nobody else fancied on a Tuesday in November. Home attendance earns fewer points, or none, on the reasonable ground that a season ticket holder in the Kop has not proved anything about their willingness to travel to Plymouth. Some clubs run a separate away membership with its own point ledger. Some run one scheme covering everything.
The two design decisions that decide whether a scheme is fair
Supporters argue about both, and clubs are rarely explicit about either.
The first is whether the point attaches to the purchase or to the attendance. If buying the ticket earns the point, a supporter can bank points by buying and never travelling, which is exactly what happens when a scheme is not policed. Most clubs now require the ticket to be scanned at the turnstile before the point is credited, which is why an unscanned digital ticket on a phone with a dead battery costs more than the price of the seat.
The second is expiry. A scheme with no expiry hands permanent priority to supporters who travelled heavily a decade ago and have since stopped, and locks out anyone who started later. Clubs deal with this by rolling points over a fixed window — a season, two seasons, sometimes three — or by tapering older points at a reduced weight. The tapering approach is the fairer one and the more common at clubs that have thought about it properly.
The weightings themselves follow a recognisable pattern across English clubs, even though no two are identical.
| What is being rewarded | Typical treatment | Why clubs do it |
|---|---|---|
| Away league match attended | The base unit, one point | The behaviour the scheme exists to rank |
| Away cup tie attended | Base unit, occasionally weighted higher | Cup aways are harder to sell and clubs need take-up |
| Home league match attended | Fewer points, or none at all | Home attendance is already rewarded by the season ticket |
| Ticket bought but not scanned | Increasingly no credit | Stops points being banked without travelling |
| Points older than the rolling window | Expired or reduced in weight | Prevents a permanent closed shop of long-lapsed travellers |
Points do not transfer between clubs. They do not transfer between people. A supporter who moves house and switches allegiance starts at zero, and a friend cannot lend you their record. Clubs also cancel points wholesale as a sanction, which is a far more effective deterrent than a fine for anyone who has spent five years accumulating them. If you want the wider context on how ticketing priority works at the same clubs for home fixtures, how to buy Premier League tickets covers the general-sale side of the same system.
When the allocation is oversubscribed: tiers, thresholds and ballots
Sales open in bands. That is the near-universal English model, and understanding the bands is more useful than understanding the points.
A typical release runs season ticket holders with the highest points first, then season ticket holders above a lower threshold, then members above a threshold, then members generally, then general sale if anything survives. The club publishes a sale date and time for each band. The threshold for each band is not usually published in advance, because the club does not know it until it sees how many people qualify — it sets the cut-off to match the seats available.
Which produces the single most frustrating feature of the system. You can have enough points for a fixture in October and not enough for the same opponent in April, because the second one falls on a Saturday and the first was on a Wednesday.
- Buy the membershipMost away allocations are closed to non-members entirely, and membership often has to be active before the sale date, not on the day.
- Accumulate a scanned recordPoints credit when the ticket is scanned at the turnstile, so attendance rather than purchase is what counts at most clubs.
- Watch the sale bandsThe club publishes a date and time for each priority band; the qualifying points threshold is set to match the allocation.
- Buy in your band or waitMissing your band means waiting for a lower one, by which point the allocation is often gone.
- Ballot for the biggest fixturesWhere demand is extreme, qualifying supporters are entered into a draw rather than a first-come sale.
- Collect or downloadPhoto identification and the membership card are commonly required, sometimes at a collection point away from the turnstiles.
The general shape of the process at most English clubs. Individual clubs vary in the number of sale bands and in whether points are credited on purchase or on entry.
When a ballot replaces the queue
Ballots appear where a first-come sale would be meaningless — a semi-final, a play-off final, a derby with an allocation a fifth the size of the demand. The club sets an eligibility bar, everyone above it enters, and the draw decides. A ballot is fairer than a server queue and it is more honest about the shortage, but it does not create seats. Clubs that run ballots well publish the eligibility criteria before entry opens and say afterwards how many entered. Clubs that run them badly do neither.
Wembley finals are their own case, because the allocation is split between the two clubs and the game's stakeholders, and the club portion is then balloted internally. How the play-off final at Wembley works goes into the mechanics of that division of tickets.
The £30 cap, and the four things it does not cover
Away ticket prices in the Premier League have been capped at £30 since the 2016-17 season. It came out of a long supporter campaign and an interim measure, the Away Fans Fund, under which clubs subsidised visiting supporters' tickets and travel from central funds for three seasons before the outright cap replaced it. The cap is renewed by a vote of the twenty clubs in multi-season blocks rather than existing permanently, so it is a policy rather than a fixture of the competition.
Four limits on it are worth knowing before you assume an away day is cheap.
It applies to Premier League matches only. A Premier League club playing an FA Cup tie or a League Cup tie at another Premier League ground is outside the cap, and the price is whatever the two clubs agree.
It applies to the face value of the ticket, not to what leaves your bank account. Booking fees, postage charges and collection fees sit outside it, and a club that wants to recover a few pounds has an obvious route.
It does not apply anywhere in the EFL. Championship, League One and League Two away prices are set club by club, and the only restraint is the reciprocal arrangement some pairs of clubs strike, where each agrees to charge the other's supporters the same as its own. These deals are voluntary, and they are more common in the lower two divisions than the Championship.
And it is a cap, not a price. Concessions for under-18s and over-65s are usually below it, and some clubs price well under the cap for fixtures they expect to struggle to sell. The relationship between what a club charges its home supporters and what it charges visitors is a separate argument, taken up in Premier League ticket prices explained.
Collecting the ticket and the identification that goes with it
Digital ticketing has changed this more in the past decade than anything since all-seater stadiums arrived. Most English clubs now deliver away tickets to a phone wallet or an app, and a growing number no longer print anything at all for away fixtures.
Where a physical ticket still exists, the away club normally posts it, and the deadline for postage is earlier than supporters expect — a ticket bought four days before a Saturday match will usually not be posted. What happens instead is collection, and collection is where away days go wrong. Some clubs collect at the home ground's ticket office. Some collect at a separate portakabin near the away turnstiles. Some require collection from your own club before you travel, which is a genuine problem for anyone driving to the fixture from somewhere other than home.
Bring photographic identification and the membership card the ticket was bought against. Clubs ask for both when they suspect a ticket has been passed on, and they ask more often for high-risk fixtures. This is not theatre: unauthorised resale of a football ticket is a criminal offence in England and Wales under section 166 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, a provision that applies to football and to almost nothing else. Selling a spare on a secondary site is not a civil breach of the club's terms. It is a crime, and clubs report it.
The practical rule for a digital ticket is duller and just as important. Download it before you leave, screenshot the barcode if the app allows it, and take a charged battery pack. Mobile data around a full English stadium an hour before kick-off is unreliable at best, and a turnstile queue is not the place to discover that the app wants to re-authenticate.
Returning an away ticket you cannot use
Away tickets are, in most club terms and conditions, non-refundable. That is the printed position and it is not the practical one.
The reason clubs are flexible is that they have their own deadline to meet. The away club pays the home club for the tickets it takes, and it can return unsold and unwanted stock up to a date set in the competition rules or the fixture agreement — typically a fortnight or so before the match, earlier for cup ties. Anything returned before that deadline costs the away club nothing. Anything returned after it has already been paid for.
So a club will usually take a ticket back cleanly if you tell them early, and will usually refuse after their own cut-off. The specific thing worth asking about is what happens to the loyalty point. A well-run scheme reverses the point along with the refund, since the point was for attendance and you did not attend. A poorly-run one leaves the point in place and creates an incentive to buy, bank the point, and hand the ticket back.
Postponements are the other case, and they work differently. Where a fixture is called off — a frozen pitch, a police reassessment, a television move that lands after tickets have gone on sale — the ticket is normally valid for the rearranged date, and a refund is offered to anyone who cannot make the new one. The rearranged date is where an away supporter loses money, because the train ticket almost never transfers. Advance rail fares are tied to a specific service, and a postponed football match is not a reason a train operator has to refund one. That asymmetry, more than the price of the seat, is what supporters' groups have spent years arguing about with the broadcasters over fixture-move notice periods.
Some clubs operate a resale queue for away tickets, matching returns to supporters who missed the sale. This is the most useful facility a ticket office can offer away supporters and comparatively few English clubs run one, because it requires staff time on a Thursday afternoon for a few dozen seats.
Never sell the ticket on. The offence above applies regardless of whether you make a profit, and clubs run checks on the major resale platforms for exactly this.
Supporters' club coaches and official travel
Most English clubs have either an official travel operation or a recognised supporters' club that runs coaches, and at many clubs both exist and compete mildly with each other. A coach usually leaves from the ground itself, sometimes with pick-ups along a main road out of the city, and returns after the match.
The economics are straightforward. For a long midweek journey the coach is almost always cheaper than the train and considerably cheaper than driving alone, and it removes the parking problem entirely, since coaches are marshalled into a designated area and released under police direction. The cost is control over your own day. The coach leaves when it leaves.
One legal point catches people out. Under the Sporting Events (Control of Alcohol etc.) Act 1985 it is an offence to carry alcohol on a vehicle carrying eight or more passengers to a designated football match in England and Wales, and the operator commits a separate offence by knowingly permitting it. Official club coaches are dry as a matter of law, not club policy, and police do board them. The same principle applies to chartered football trains, which is why train travel to English football matches is a different proposition on a scheduled service than on a special.
Then there is the bubble match. Where police impose the strictest form of restriction on a fixture, away tickets are issued only to supporters travelling on official transport, collected on the coach or at a rendezvous point, and the coaches are escorted in and straight out again. Bubble matches are rare, unpopular with supporters' groups, and applied to a small number of fixtures with a history of disorder. Where one applies, there is no route in for an away supporter travelling independently.
Buying a home ticket as an away fan
Clubs prohibit it. Every English ground's regulations require supporters to occupy the section allocated to their club, and the ticket terms make buying home seats for away supporters a breach that voids the ticket without refund.
The enforcement is more sophisticated than it used to be. Clubs flag new memberships bought in a burst before a derby, cluster purchases by postcode, monitor forwarding patterns on digital tickets, and simply watch the home sections during the game. Stewards do not need to prove anything to a criminal standard to remove somebody. They need a reasonable belief.
The consequences run further than the ejection. The membership or season ticket used to buy the seat is normally cancelled, the account behind it is banned from future purchases, and where the seats were bought by a season ticket holder for somebody else, the season ticket holder loses theirs. Anyone who has read a club's disciplinary notices knows that the person who supplied the tickets is treated at least as seriously as the person who used them.
The safety argument behind the rule is real rather than decorative. Segregation exists so that stewards and police can predict where two sets of supporters will be, and an unsegregated pocket in a home stand is the specific scenario that produces the incidents. Away fan segregation explained sets out how the sterile areas, escort routes and stewarding lines are actually designed.
The exception, worth stating because it is the only one: a genuinely neutral fixture, or a club that formally opens sections to both sets of supporters. Some low-risk fixtures in the lower divisions and a good deal of non-league football operate without segregation at all.
Where the away section sits in different English grounds
Nothing about English away ends is standardised, because the grounds were not built to a standard. What you get depends on when the stand went up and what the club could afford at the time.
The Victorian and inter-war grounds put away fans behind a goal, and the ones that survive still do. Away supporters at Kenilworth Road famously reach their seats up a flight of steps built between the back gardens of a terrace, an arrangement that is genuinely unlike anything else in English football and has outlasted several decades of plans to replace it. Selhurst Park puts visitors side-on in the Arthur Wait Stand, which is an unusual arrangement and gives a better view than most away ends.
The large modern bowls have a different problem. Where a stadium is a continuous ring, there is no natural block to hand over, so the away section is cut out of a corner — often high in an upper tier, because the top of a corner is the easiest place to isolate with a sterile row and a line of stewards. Away supporters at Old Trafford sit in the corner of the third tier, a long way up and a long way from the pitch. The Emirates puts visitors in an upper corner on the same logic. Anfield keeps its away support in the Anfield Road end, retained through the redevelopment of that stand.
A third category sits between the two: the ground where an entire stand was rebuilt at a different date from the rest, leaving a mismatched corner that becomes the away block by default. Bramall Lane and Molineux both carry the marks of piecemeal reconstruction across the 1990s, where each stand was replaced when the money existed rather than to a single plan, and the away sections at grounds of that type tend to be whichever block was easiest to isolate afterwards rather than a block designed for the purpose.
The consequences are practical. A high corner has a long climb, a small concourse, and a slow exit. An older behind-the-goal end may have supporting pillars, a low roof that traps noise, and a view of the far corner flag that requires imagination. Neither is disclosed at the point of sale, and clubs rarely mark restricted-view away seats as restricted. Ask on a forum before a first visit, or check biggest football stadiums in England for how the layouts differ by era of construction.
Ground regulations, ejections and banning orders
The ticket is a licence to enter on conditions, and the conditions are printed on the back or linked from the confirmation email. The list is longer than most supporters have ever read.
Persistent standing in a seated area is a breach at every all-seater ground in England. Enforcement in away ends has been inconsistent for thirty years and clubs know it, which is a large part of why licensed standing areas were introduced at grounds that wanted them — the subject of safe standing in English stadiums. Where an away end is seated, though, the rule stands, and clubs under pressure from their safety certificate do act on it.
Three things move from club sanction into criminal law, and away supporters should know which. Possessing a flare or a firework at a designated football match is an offence under the 1985 Act. Going onto the playing area without lawful authority, throwing anything towards the pitch or the stands, and indecent or racialist chanting are all offences under the Football (Offences) Act 1991. Being drunk inside a ground, or attempting to enter while drunk, is an offence in its own right.
A conviction for a football-related offence opens the door to a football banning order under the Football Spectators Act 1989. The court makes one where it is satisfied the order would help prevent violence or disorder at football matches, and the duration is set by statute: three to five years in the ordinary case, and six to ten years where the sentence includes immediate custody. A banning order requires the subject to report to a police station around regulated matches, and to surrender their passport before England play abroad.
- Steward interventionThe safety officer has operational control of the ground and stewards act on reasonable belief, not proof.
- Ejection without refundNo court is involved and the ticket terms allow it for any breach of ground regulations.
- Report to the away clubThe home club passes details of ejected supporters to the visiting club's ticket office.
- Club sanctionMembership cancelled, season ticket withdrawn, loyalty points wiped, purchase account blocked.
- Police involvementOnly where a criminal offence is alleged, most commonly under the Football (Offences) Act 1991.
- Football banning orderImposed by a court on conviction or on police complaint, running three to five years, or six to ten with custody.
The routes available to a club and to the police, not a sequence every incident follows. The overwhelming majority of ejections end at the second step.
Club-level sanctions arrive faster and often hurt more. A withdrawn membership, a cancelled season ticket and a wiped loyalty record can all be imposed on the club's own evidence without a court, and clubs publish the numbers each season.
Building a points record from a standing start
Everything above describes a system that rewards people who have already been going. Getting into it from zero takes a season and a certain willingness to travel badly.
Start with the fixtures nobody wants. A League Cup second-round tie two hundred miles away on a Tuesday will very often reach general sale, and it earns the same point as a Saturday derby. The same is true of early FA Cup rounds, of long midweek league journeys in the winter, and of any fixture moved to a Monday night for television — the 3pm blackout rule and the broadcast schedule between them produce a handful of genuinely awkward kick-off times every season, and awkward kick-off times mean available tickets.
Buy the away membership before you need it. Many clubs require a membership to have been active before the sale date, so joining on the morning of a release achieves nothing. Where a club sells a dedicated away scheme separately from general membership, the away one is what counts.
Make sure the point actually registers. Scan the ticket yourself rather than being waved through a gate by a steward, check the account afterwards, and query anything missing within days rather than in April when it matters. Points disputes are settled by turnstile data, and turnstile data is not kept forever.
Keep an eye on returns. Clubs release unsold away stock back into sale in the days before a match, usually without announcing it, and refreshing a ticket page on a Thursday evening is an unglamorous but effective habit. That, plus the willingness to go to Barnsley on a wet Wednesday, is how a points record gets built. The rest of the day — the travel, the pub, the ground itself — is covered in the English football away days guide and, for the drinking end of it, matchday pubs near English grounds. If you are new to the structure of the competitions behind all this, the football section is the place to start.