First Compromise Reached In National League Play Off Final Spat

The 2024/25 National League campaign was a pretty entertaining one this year, and although Barnet ultimately ran away with top spot to secure their own promotion into League Two for the coming 2025/26 season with 102 points, York City’s haul of 96 will leave them disappointed, particularly following their defeat to Oldham Athletic in the Play Off path.

With National League results seeing Oldham join Southend United in the Wembley showpiece Play Off Final next month, fans of both clubs were left initially outraged by the decision to only award each club a lower and capped allocation of just 20,000 for the event and National League previews would show you why that would be an issue for both clubs.

The decision was taken partly owing to the fact that planned engineering work means that no London Underground trains will be running to Wembley Park station on the day, and it kicked off quite the political fuss with Labour MP David Burton-Sampson (Southend West and Leigh) confirming that he had contacted government ministers directly over the issue.

Solution

Confirming that he was one of a number of people working hard behind the scenes to ‘try and get this ridiculous situation resolved’ he was initially quite confident that a solution would be quickly found and asked fans of both clubs to ‘watch this space’ like they had watched National League live scores throughout the season.

A Wembley Stadium spokesperson had countered that ‘the safety and security of fans’ was obviously their ‘paramount importance’ and whilst the lack of any direct trains to the Stadium is hardly ideal, fans would naturally alter their own plans to find workarounds and would undoubtedly just start their travel day earlier, so many would question how much of a ‘safety and security’ issue this actually was in the first place.

Others would undoubtedly question why a well known date in the football calendar was picked for planned, and not unforeseen emergency, engineering works in the first place given that the disruption to fans could very easily be anticipated here.

Ticket Allocation

With both clubs having been granted just 17,500 tickets with a further 2,500 coach and ticket packages each for the 90,000 capacity national stadium, both sides were confident that they could very easily sell well beyond the cap that had been imposed for the game and Southend were actually that confident that they went on record as stating that they believed the attendance record of 47,029 set in 2015 by Bristol Rovers and Grimsby Town, back in the days when the division was known as the Conference, would now be beaten.

Whether or not a new record will be set remains to be seen but with National League standings this would be a good chance to do just that, but over the weekend following additional involvement from Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, amongst others, it was confirmed that the allocations for both clubs had been lifted from 17,500 tickets to 21,500 tickets.

The last update from Southend was that they had already sold out of the tickets that were made available, stating that given the expressions of interest that they had received so far that they still believed that they could sell in excess of 35,000 if they were allowed.

Undoubtedly talks will continue as we go into the new week and a further compromise could well see that ticket cap lifted once again.