Como's seat gesture shows tickets, not money, test Champions League debutants

Key takeaways

• The BBC reports that Como president Mirwan Suwarso and several directors are giving up their tickets for the club's Champions League debut so that elderly supporters can attend.
• When a small club reaches the Champions League, it gains money but not seats, so it has to decide who gets the seats it has.
• UEFA matches take tickets away from the local general sale, because visiting supporters, official delegations, media, partners and hospitality all need places.
• Older, long-standing supporters are the people most likely to lose out to ballots, digital ticketing and higher prices, which is why the club's gesture is aimed at them.

Seats, not money, set the limit on a newcomer's first season

The BBC reports that Como's president, Mirwan Suwarso, and several of the club's directors will give up their tickets for the club's first Champions League match so that elderly supporters can be there. How many seats this frees, how the supporters are chosen and whether the arrangement will continue beyond the first match are not stated in the report as summarised here. Those details are not known.

The gesture is small, but it points to something larger. A club that qualifies for the Champions League for the first time gets a large rise in central income, plus more broadcast exposure and commercial interest. It does not get more seats. Its ground holds the same number of people as before, but now many more groups want a place in it: supporters who followed the club through the lower divisions, newer fans attracted by its rise, visiting supporters, sponsors, guests of the competition organiser, and neutral visitors who want to see the competition's most famous clubs.

So the hard question for a debutant is not what to do with the money. It is who gets the seats. Every allocation decision moves a fixed number of places from one group to another. When directors give up seats, the club is admitting openly that its own officials are one of those groups, and that their claim can be given up in favour of supporters who might otherwise be left out.

The rest of this article sets out why that reading holds up, the strongest objection to it, and what would change the conclusion.

A European night takes seats away from the general sale before it begins

The first piece of evidence is how a UEFA club match is organised. In a domestic league game, a club has fairly wide discretion over its ground, within its league's rules. In UEFA competition, the home club has to meet a set of obligations that take places away from the local general sale before a single ticket goes on public sale.

Visiting supporters must be given an allocation. The visiting club's official delegation needs seats. Accredited media need working positions, and broadcasters need camera positions, which can cost seats in some parts of a ground. The competition's commercial partners have entitlements, and the home club's own sponsors and hospitality guests expect places at the biggest occasion the club has hosted. Security planning can require segregation zones, buffer areas and restricted sections that further reduce the number of usable seats.

None of this is unusual or improper. These are the normal conditions of staging a match in a competition with central commercial arrangements and a wide audience. But the effect is uneven. A large club with a large stadium absorbs these demands and still has plenty left for its own supporters. A club with a modest ground loses a much larger share of its capacity to them.

Directors' seats belong to the same group of places reserved by protocol and position rather than sold. Giving them up does not change UEFA's requirements. It does give back to ordinary supporters some of the seats the occasion has taken from them, and it does so from the club's own share, not from anyone else's entitlement.

Older supporters are the ones the modern ticket market leaves out

The second piece of evidence is the target of the gesture. The BBC reports that the seats are meant for elderly supporters. That choice makes sense once you look at how tickets for high-demand matches are distributed.

When demand far exceeds supply, clubs usually use some mix of priority by membership or season-ticket history, online ballots, timed sale windows and digital or app-based tickets. Each method is a reasonable way to ration a scarce product, and each puts some people at a disadvantage. Ballots reward people who enter quickly and repeatedly. Timed online sales favour people with fast connections, saved payment details and the confidence to deal with queues and verification steps. Mobile-only ticketing excludes people who do not use smartphones, or use them reluctantly. Higher prices for a special occasion exclude people on fixed incomes.

Older supporters are more likely to face several of these barriers at once. They are also often the people with the longest attachment to a club. They watched it in quieter seasons, when tickets were easy to get and there was little to celebrate. A club's first Champions League match is the occasion those supporters have the strongest claim to see, and the one where the market works against them most.

Picking this group as the beneficiary shows that the club recognises the problem with its normal allocation system. A good system for the club would reward long-term loyalty. In practice, under high demand, systems tend to reward speed, digital ease and spending power. The directors' gesture is a manual correction to that outcome, made because the automatic one would not deliver it.

Champions League money pulls clubs toward new audiences

The third piece of evidence is the economics of the competition. The Champions League league phase has 36 clubs, and each plays eight matches, four at home and four away, before the knockout rounds. For a newcomer, each home fixture is a chance to earn matchday revenue, sell premium hospitality and introduce the club to sponsors and audiences it could not reach before.

That creates a commercial pull away from long-standing local supporters. A seat sold as hospitality earns more than a seat sold to a pensioner at a standard price. A club that is investing in its squad, its facilities and its international profile has a clear reason to make the most of each of those four home nights. A club in a well-known destination may also face demand from visitors who see the match as part of a trip, and who are often willing to pay more than local regulars.

The distribution of Champions League money across European football is already a source of tension. The central payments go up sharply with participation, and the gap they open between clubs inside the competition and those outside it is a recurring concern for domestic leagues. The ticketing question is the same pressure at the scale of one stadium. The money that lifts a club also raises the value of every seat, and so raises the cost of keeping seats for the club's traditional supporters.

When directors give up their own places, they are going against that pull in a visible way. The gesture is cheap compared with the club's overall revenue, but it shows what the club says it values, in a setting where the commercial incentives point the other way.

The strongest objection: a symbolic act that changes almost nothing

The fairest case against this argument goes like this. A few directors' seats are a tiny share of any stadium. Moving them to elderly supporters changes nothing about how the other seats are allocated, how they are priced or who gets them. If the club's general sale, hospitality pricing and ticketing technology stay as they are, the supporters the gesture is meant to help will still lose out at every other match, and at this one too, apart from the few who benefit.

On this view, the gesture is good communications rather than evidence of a structural constraint. Directors can usually watch from somewhere: a media area, a private room, a pitchside position, or the away end at another fixture. Giving up a named seat may cost them little. The publicity is valuable. A story about generous officials helps any club entering a competition where it wants to build a following, and costs far less than changing ticket prices or reserving a proper share of every sale for long-standing supporters.

The objection has a second strand. Seat scarcity is not unique to newcomers. Many established clubs with large grounds also cannot meet demand for their biggest matches. If scarcity is everywhere, it is hard to argue that it defines the debutant's experience in particular, rather than being a general feature of elite football. The money, the squad investment and the step up in competitive level could reasonably be called the more important test.

This case deserves to be taken seriously. A single gesture is weak evidence of policy. The argument here does not depend on the gesture being large. It depends on what it reveals: the club found it needed a manual intervention to get a particular group of supporters into the ground. That need is the structural point, and the objection does not remove it. The objection does fairly limit how much can be read into the gesture by itself.

The evidence that would change this conclusion

Several kinds of information would strengthen or weaken the argument, and none are known from the report as summarised.

If Como published how tickets for its European matches were divided between season-ticket holders, members, general sale, away supporters, hospitality and official allocations, the scale of the squeeze could be judged directly rather than inferred. A small share left for general sale would support the argument. A large one would weaken it.

If the club turned the gesture into a standing policy, such as a reserved allocation or priority window for older or long-standing supporters across all its European home matches, that would show the club treats scarcity as a structural problem. If the gesture stays a one-off for the debut, the symbolic reading becomes more convincing.

Pricing would also be telling. If European ticket prices for standard seats stayed close to domestic levels, the club would be absorbing the cost of scarcity rather than passing it on, which would support the idea that it puts access ahead of yield. Steep rises would point the other way.

Finally, any move to a larger venue, or plans to expand capacity, would change the problem entirely. If seats stopped being scarce, allocation would matter much less, and the test for a debutant really would be the money and how it is spent.

Sources and further reading

• BBC Sport: the report on Como's president and directors giving up their tickets for the club's Champions League debut so elderly supporters could attend.
• UEFA: the competition regulations covering stadium requirements, ticket allocations for visiting clubs and the league-phase format.
• Lega Serie A: background on how Italian clubs qualify for UEFA competitions through league position.
• Football supporters' organisations: published positions on ticket pricing, digital-only ticketing and access for older supporters.