Thursday 24 July 2025 and within 4 minutes of ticket for Crystal Palace going on sale the CST had received a photo from one of our members showing that there were already 100k Chelsea supporters in the queue for the approximate 4k tickets for sale.
Despite the club marketing the benefits of the new £60 True Blue membership which including giving 24 hour priority access for the first days sale there were a lot of unhappy Chelsea supporters not able to get a ticket for the first game of the season.
When we were first made aware of the £60 True Blue membership we did advise the club that if you advertise that the new membership would have “priority access” it would very likely create an impression that buyers of the membership would believe THEY had priority and some form of exclusivity and there was a likelihood that the historic issues of the VWR would be recreated if a large majority of the existing 90k club members under the old scheme all bought a new True Blue membership .
So, it appears that many supporters may have bought True Blue memberships on the basis that they thought they had a better chance of buying a ticket for Premier League games this season.
We also advised the club that if they were going to have a True Blue membership it would be far better if the True Blue membership was capped or was only exclusive to supporters with high level of points based over recent seasons or based on some form of loyalty system. If you do not cap the number of True Blue members the benefits of a priority window will continue to reduce.
After the Crystal Palace tickets sold out in 15 minutes, we continued to receive message from supporters and since then we have had sight of a number of complaint emails sent to the club from CST members unhappy with missing out on a ticket but also some expressing the view that they had been mis-sold a True Blue membership and were now asking for their £60 to be refunded. Club Members have not had a good deal on ticketing over recent seasons paying increasingly more for their match tickets, their memberships and with a decreasing opportunity to buy a ticket unless it is a Conference League game or pre season friendly.
We have said to the club that supporters would value and appreciate some communication acknowledging their frustrations and providing an explanation of what happened during the Crystal Palace sales window. Many supporters have said that they hope that Crystal Palace is a first game glitch and ticket selling will improve from the Fulham game onwards.
Going forward what would also be extremely helpful for Chelsea supporters to know are:
How many True Blue Memberships are there?
How many tickets are available in the Phase 1 True Blue priority purchase window?
We have asked the club these questions. We will update members if we receive this information.
When launching the new ticketing system, the club emphasised that this new system would help combat touts, so no sooner had tickets sold out then thousands of tickets were already available on secondary sites for inflated prices. We know digital ticketing will not eliminate ticket touting and there will be tickets on secondary sites that are speculative or do not exist, but there will be genuine tickets that end up being sold on secondary sites which only adds to supporters’ anger and frustration.
Then no doubt the bots/tout gangs were also trying to get tickets. We were told by a number of supporters trying to get tickets that they had to prove they were human by going through several bot check screens.
An early update on how the new system works to help combat touts and early data on how the new system is working to prevent touts/bots getting through to buy tickets is going to be very important.
