 ECHO: Can you tell us how many tickets were available in the ballot and how many fans were entered into the ballot? Rick Parry: I’m not going to go into the breakdown of the 17,000 tickets because I don’t think that serves any useful purpose. It isn’t going to produce any more tickets.? ECHO: One of the arguments we’ve had from fans is that they do not understand why they cannot have transparency on this. Rick Parry: Well, they never have. We have never given a full breakdown of where tickets go and, as I say, that would not help or produce any more tickets. There are two issues that create the difference between this time and Istanbul and only two issues. One is the reduced number of tickets and the second is significantly more people having been to six games – a lot more. Far fewer people in 2005 had been to six games or more? ECHO: Are you talking 30,000 plus who have been to six games this time? Rick Parry: Yes. ECHO: Some fans have suggested it is imperative that the club tell them the numbers involved in the ballot. Rick Parry: No, it is not imperative that we get involved in the numbers game. The imperative thing is that the number of people who got tickets was in proportion to the numbers in the ballot. So the ratio of season ticket holders to fan card holders that actually ended up with tickets was exactly the ratio of the numbers of people in the ballot. There were suggestions there was a bias towards people with fan cards. There wasn’t. There have been suggestions that we favoured out-of-towners. That’s ridiculous. Why would we? What would we even contemplate doing that for? It wasn’t conducted in the ticket office. There have been suggestions of collusion but it was done in a completely independent, computer generated process which could not be interfered with. And once people had gone into the ballot there was an even spread. They all had an equal chance and that’s how the tickets have come out. ECHO: Is there any suggestion there might have been any glitches with the system? Rick Parry: ?No. None at all. There have not been any glitches but, clearly, as we have said all along there were nowhere near enough tickets. It’s as simple as that. There has been no conspiracy, no manipulation. A number of people have been successful in the ballot, albeit not as many as we would have liked. It’s not as if no-one is emerging from the ballot with a ticket? ECHO: When it became clear there would not be enough tickets to go around why was the system not refined to take into account credits built up last season or tickets bought for the Maccabi Haifa qualifying game? Rick Parry: Because at the start of the season we set out what the policy would be and we did not feel it appropriate to change the system now. You can mount a whole series of arguments as to better ways of doing a ballot? You could reward loyalty over 5 years or over 10 years. You can have legitimate arguments over all of those things. You can argue that you should reward attendance at Premier League games but nobody argued that at the start of the season when we published the policy; nobody said that’s rubbish, we must do it differently; and the policy we have had consistently over the last few years has been to reward attendance at particular cup competitions. As I say, you can argue with the policy but I don‘t think you argue with the policy two weeks before the final. If you want to argue do so at the start of the season because what about the people who have bought tickets for the Champions League games thinking we’ ve got a chance of going to the final, and we suddenly say well, we know you bought them on that basis, but we‘ve changed our minds. ECHO: Is there not an argument that those fans who go to the less popular away games like Portsmouth are actually showing greater loyalty than those who choose only to go to the popular ones, like those in the Champions League? Rick Parry: Yes. I can certainly understand the argument. I could advance 50 different arguments, each of which offer a different basis for allocating the tickets, but this club’s policy has been that we allocate tickets for finals on the basis of attendance in that particular competition. We have separated out the different cup competitions from the league. One of the reasons we did that – and it goes back to 2001-03 – was because we got a lot of complaints from supporters who had been to the early rounds of the League Cup, for example, against Grimsby in the rain and there was a low attendance, and they were getting squeezed out by season ticket holders who had not been to a single game in the competition when it got to the semi-finals and finals. ECHO: Is that what you are trying to guard against with this policy – season ticket holders being able to cherry pick the more glamorous games at the expense of non-season ticket holders who have attended more rounds? Rick Parry: What season tickets do guarantee you is the opportunity to go to every home game and if every season ticket holder took up their allocation for every Champions League game there would be hardly any non-season ticket holders in the ballot. ECHO: So your position is that the advantage season ticket holders have is they are presented with an opportunity to build up their loyalty in a particular competition from the very outset? Rick Parry: If you are a season ticket holder you can virtually guarantee tickets for every game by going through the stages. But an awful lot of season ticket holders haven’t been to every game. Now, if they had, you would end up with virtually the same number in the ballot because you would still have everyone who had been to the six games wanting tickets. We would still have had the same restriction on the number of tickets so you would still get back to the same problem that there aren‘t enough tickets to go round for everyone who wants them. In a sense, what has happened is it’s not so much that season ticket holders who have been to every game have been discriminated against. If other season ticket holders had been to those games they would have been in the ballot ahead of the fan card holders, so you would still end up with the same number of people in the ballot. | 
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