Lack Of European Tickets Is Totally Unacceptable

It’s disappointing that so many fans can’t go to the Champions League and Europa League finals due to the cost and poor ticket availability.

European Tickets
Football is becoming more about what the big federations and associations can make from the big games.

Moving the Europa League final to Baku has not been a great move. Look at the Henrikh Mkhitaryan situation. He can’t travel to Baku because of diplomatic reasons as Armenian people are not welcome in Azerbaijan. That’s not right.

You cannot have a player excluded from what would be considered as one of the biggest games of Mkhitaryan’s career.

It’s totally unacceptable.

Then throw into the mix the fact there’s only six thousand tickets available for both sides. That cannot be acceptable either given the size of both clubs.

The Champions League final is the same. There simply aren’t enough tickets made available to Tottenham or Liverpool, two more huge clubs.

It’s becoming more and more about the corporate side of the game, the revenue that can be created for UEFA. It’s moving away rapidly from the supporters and what the trophies are actually meaning to the supporters which will just alienate them more and more going forward.

There simply has to be more tickets available to the genuine fans who turn up week after week to watch their teams play.

Premier League Race
The best thing about the Premier League last season was that we had a title race. We haven’t had that in a while.

At least Liverpool were able to maintain some sort of challenge and we had a good race right up until the final day of the season which was brilliant.

Chelsea, Tottenham, Man United and Arsenal have a massive gap between themselves and Man City and Liverpool.

Given the revenue, finance and talent that’s available to Premier League clubs in the Top 6, there should be a better battle for the top 4 spots, particularly the top 2. Next season I’m looking for Chelsea and Tottenham to close the gap a little bit more.

Tottenham are a different club in many respects and will not have a lot of money available to them so that’s where they have to perhaps rely on what Pochettino has done over the last few seasons. They need to try and build for the future with what they have.

The fact is though, that Liverpool and Man City look streets ahead of the rest and we’ll probably see more of the same from them next season.

Maurizio Sarri
It was surprising when Maurizio Sarri said that he would leave Chelsea immediately if his future depended on winning the Europa League final.

If you look at Mauricio Pochettino did; he has used the Champions League final as a way to elevate himself to say, “Look, if we do win, I probably will leave the club”, as there isn’t much else he can actually achieve at Tottenham.

I think that would have been a better line for Sarri to take.

It looks to me like certain things have transpired against Sarri and that certain people within the club are going against him also. It looks quite ominous and it looks like he will be leaving similar to Antonio Conte last season. That’s the model that Chelsea have used.

I think the Europa League final is very intriguing with how both Arsenal and Chelsea have done this season. Chelsea of course have been a bit more consistent than Arsenal this season. Arsenal have to win this game to qualify for the Champions League so they really have nothing to lose. They can throw it at Chelsea.