Empty seats results – 2021/22

What is it and why do it?

Each season as our wonderful football club got more & more successful, winning more & more silverware and gaining plaudits from even the most cynical, green-eyed monsters; I noticed, more & more, that Manyoo fans (not exclusively as band-waggon jumpers / fans of other teams joined in) started on the “empty seats” jibe at us.

Although I could clearly see these unoccupied, flip-up chairs down at the Etihad, I just thought one day back in the 2012/13 season…

‘I bet the difference between us & Manyoo in terms of how many seats are left unoccupied isn’t “all that” over a full season…certainly not enough for them to keep laboriously bleating on about it much as they do’.

So, I set about keeping a record of each club’s attendances; simply calculating the difference between the attendance at a game against official ground capacity. And do you know what? The results have mostly shown that very thing to be the case – the difference is just not worth squawking on about.

In fact, there have been a few seasons since my records began 9 years ago where…guess what? The team from Trafford had more empty seats over the whole season and in all competitions than WE did!

So…this season

Each season, I keep telling myself that I’ll stop record keeping and publishing this end-of-season piece. And if by some miracle “they” stop boring me with the same old rhetoric without stopping, for one moment, to think & recognise the fact that there’s little difference between our club’s empty seat count and theirs; then I’ll gladly stop.

From memory, it didn’t take long for ‘em to start up again this season, so I started my record keeping quite early on.

Here are the results…and there are notable wins for both sides this season:

Manyoo’s capacity in all competition:

74,140, which is down by 487 from the previous season due to ‘phase 3’ (of 3) of converting an area of the ground to enable more disabled access.

Empty seats in all competitions: 28,894

Least number of empty seats at a game (best attendance): 576 v Chelsea in the Premier League

Most number of empty seats at a game (worst attendance): 2,269 v Middlesbrough in the F.A. Cup

Manchester City’s capacities:

53,400 for league and domestic cup games, which is down by 1,697 from last season due to alterations to some lower, pitch-side seating areas for some reason (possibly a similar reason to Manyoo, I might be right in suggesting) and it’s 53,000 for Champions League matches due to UEFA regulations.

Empty seats in all competitions: 56,372

Least number of empty seats at a game (best attendance): 0 (full house) v Fulham in the F.A. Cup.

Most number of empty seats at a game (worst attendance): 22,441 v Wycombe Wanderers in the League Cup.

Difference between both clubs all season and in all competitions?

We had 27,478 more empty seats than Manyoo. That’s one to them. HOWEVER! And it really is a BIG however.

It can often work out like this – and it’s worked well in Manyoo’s favour on this occasion – but whereas we had an early League Cup round at home to a lower-league side, they didn’t. Like us, they did have a 3^rd round League Cup home game but it was like a Premier League fixture for them; being, as it was, against West Ham United.

We had League One’s Wycombe Wanderers at the Etihad that saw a sizable 22,441 empty seats that evening, which put a proper dent in our final score. Another cup home game attendance, not long before that one, didn’t help either; with 14,938 seats not being filled in our Champions League home game against RB Leipzig.

But as you can see, we had the best attendance against capacity with a full house against Fulham; whilst Manyoo’s best attendance v Chelsea still saw 576 seats with no bottom on it. That’s one to us.

 

I ALSO need to point out that for Premier League games, our empty seat count was less than 1,000 for most league encounters; whereas the vast majority of Manyoo’s league fixtures saw over 1,000 empties.

 

Of course, the club with the largest number of empty seats against capacity in a single game was us with that match against Wycombe. That’s another one to them.

So, there you ‘ave it. What will I do with these figures other than posting them on my blog to share with fellow Blues? Nothing…not unless a REALLY persistent wasp comes along and I feel that I have to flick it away with these stats. Other than that, it’ll just sit in my records ready to be brought out whenever the time feels right to do so.

Of course, feel free to use it or not yourself…

Thank you, as always, for taking the time to read - there should be another blog-posting along in the next day or three…