IT'S FINALLY HERE! Season tickets, flares and Brandywell seating

From match day preparation, to sponsorship, to security and one thousand other jobs, Bert Martin is the man leading a very small team behind the scenes at the Brandywell.

Everyone knows Bert, but no-one could tell you what his exact job is. The man himself sometimes wonders, as he covers that many different areas in any one day. His official role is ‘Commercial Manager’, but, now employed in a full-time capacity after years of diligent volunteer work, he is the man you go to, to get things done. Which can be a lot for a club run largely due to the committed work of its volunteers.

These days, a Derry City ticket is the hottest ticket in town, but with success come challenges, as Bert has found out first hand.

“It’s grown massively in the last couple of years because, coming out of Covid, we’ve had bigger crowds and bigger demand,” he reflects. “We have more restrictions on crowds in the stadium from a safety point of view and obviously, with bigger crowds, there’s bigger ticket demands and bigger administration demands. It’s a pretty busy job at the minute.

“People don’t see behind the scenes, the meetings that go around the safety and security, the ticketing process, not just season tickets but also match day tickets, be it getting tickets online or getting tickets to the usual outlets and getting them collected. It’s just planning the whole event and making sure the stadium is prepared properly for match night.”

A volunteer at one stage, on the Development Committee the next, and a Club Director for 10 years, Bert has covered it all in over two decades with his local club. He just keeps coming back for more.

“It’s a kind of passion for the club, for the football and for the city,” he explains. “There have always been amazing people around the club, either working there or volunteering, and when you are working with people like that it makes it very, very easy and we continuously have people coming along looking to volunteer. The timing of this opportunity was just right and I’m glad I took it and I’m very, very busy.

“It’s a really exciting time. I know the expectations are really high and I know the manager and the backroom team will be working hard to reach those expectations, but we have to reach those expectations of the supporters off the pitch too. We’ve seen good times and bad times but hopefully we keep going onwards and upwards and win more silverware in the next few seasons.”

Issues

You cannot always make everyone happy, and despite the hard work put in to ensure the club is run as best it can be, Bert and his team of volunteers often find themselves the subject of some supporters’ frustrations.

“Social media has been of great benefit to all sorts of business and sport over the years but it can also be very divisive,” he admits. “Someone can make a comment and loads of people can jump on that comment and be very critical of volunteers and of staff and of things that have happened. Nobody actually realises the amount of work and the amount of preparation that has to go on behind the scenes.”

While demand amongst fans is high, so too is demand from sponsors, with the club’s success on the pitch translating to interest from a commercial point of view.

“From a sponsorship point of view, I have noticed in the last year that there are more and more local businesses and bigger companies who want to get involved with the club,” Bert acknowledges. “We’re nearly maximized at that, but we will always welcome new sponsors and partners on board. But a few bad results and a bad season, and that could all turn around again and it might be more difficult to get that commercial income. Commercial income is very, very important because you couldn’t really survive on just your gate receipts alone to be honest.”

BERT MARTIN ADDRESSES THE KEY ISSUES BETWEEN THE CLUB AND THE FANS

SEASON TICKETS

“Season tickets have been delivered back to us, so first of all we make sure they are printed and done the way we want them to be done. They are being done via Future Ticketing, a professional printer in Dublin. We will then link in with our distribution partner, IPrint, and they will take a few days to look at the best way to distribute the season tickets to people’s houses. People should not panic at al. Worse case scenario, everyone who has bought a season ticket has got a barcode sent to them, and that is effectively their season ticket for this year, even though it’s in paper form. If you mislaid your season card, then the barcode you have in your confirmation email will grant you admission to the match. But it is our firm intention to have everyone’s cards distrusted to them within the next few days.”

General Match Tickets

“We’ve spent a few months getting the renewal process sorted, and we had a lot of difficulties with that, but we now have 98% of people renewed who want to renew. If there is anyone who has missed out for some reason, we will accommodate them over the coming weeks. We have sold a higher number than last year, but we have maintained terracing and seats on a match-to-match basis, so there will be tickets available for every game.”

KIDS TICKETS

“We are restricted to 3,200 seats in the stadium approximately. Of the season tickets that have been sold, half of them are adults and the other half are split between kids and concessionary, so there are a huge number of kids’ tickets, that have been sold as season tickets. These have to be limited to an extent because if we were to sell another 300 children’s tickets, then that is 300 less adult season tickets available, so we have to get a happy medium in this.

“I know it’s very frustrating for parents and it has been difficult to get children’s tickets, but the capacity in the stadium dictates what we can sell. If we had the capacity we would sell another thousand children’s tickets, but that would be a thousand less adults able to access a seat. In conjunction with council, we are able to use more terrace tickets, which are basically the standing areas at each side of the Mark Farren.

"We tried that for the President’s Cup game against Shamrock Rovers and it worked really well. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to issue children’s terrace tickets, because the area in question is flat, and if there are 200 adults standing, there is no way a child with have a good sight line for the match. So we have decided it is no fair to sell a children’s terrace ticket whenever the child might not get to see a game. It's from a visual point of view, but also a safety point of view, because it would force a lot of people to surge forward towards the safety barriers and we don’t want that either.

"We have to keep 10% of our allocation for away fans for every match. If the away supporters have not taken up their full allocation, it then allows us to release another couple of hundred tickets near the kick off, and in that case, percentage of those would be children’s tickets as well, but that’s on a match-to-match basis.”

ADULTS USING KIDS’ TICKETS

“This year our ticketing partner, Future Ticketing, will be attending the games and they will be hand scanning tickets at the entry points, and they will be very robust at anyone using a children or concessionary ticket, who they believe should not have that ticket – they will be challenged and refused entry of they don’t have the right ticket. We are just advising everyone please do not try and gain entry with the wrong ticket because you will be stopped. It’s not fair for someone to pay the full adult price and then someone else to get in using a child’s ticket.”

BRANDYWELL CAPACITY

“The club is working closely with council to increase capacity. There was to be an extension to the Mark Farren Stand many years ago, and it would have brought in another 900 seats. Because of a lack of an Executive and other political aspects that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen in the short-term.

"There is some money ring-fenced in the Executive for substadia funding, and council would be able to use some of that money, but I really don’t know if the money put aside will now be sufficient to do the work that was scheduled, because the costs of works etc have gone up significantly over the last few years. It would really be down to council as the landlords and the Executive to decide what kind of time line can happen for additional seating.

"The club is also talking to council about providing additional terrace space. Talks are ongoing and nothing has been finalized but hopefully by the beginning of the 2024 season, we will be in a position to have some more terracing space. But nothing has been confirmed yet.”

FLARES

“We appealed to the people intending to pay tribute last week not to use flares or smoke bombs because apart from the safety concerns, it costs the club a fortune. They are very, very dangerous. Our security company are very robust in searching people going into the ground, but it’s very difficult to pick up on everything because there are people who still manage to get alcohol in, as well as flares and smoke bombs.

"We just have to appeal to our supporters – the more this happens, the more we’re going to get fined, and the less progress the club will make.

“I know last season, virtually every game early in the season, we received a thousand euro fine. We also received very heavy fines for the European game in Riga, because of pitch encroachment and because of flares and people refusing to sit down. PULSE did get a good handle on it throughout the season and there were fewer and fewer incidents of flares and smoke bombs as the season went on, but we really need it to stop.

"It’s very, very dangerous. People have been burned and people have lost limbs over flares exploding so I would just hate to see somebody getting a serious injury through tis at the Brandywell, because anything can happen, and we really need people to stop bringing these items into the stadium.

“Anyone caught will not be allowed back into the ground again. Anyone caught bringing flares in, or using flares or smoke bombs during a game will receive long-term bans from the stadium.”