THE BEST WAY TO GET TICKETS TO THE EMIRATES, AND ANSWERS TO OTHER FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ARE HERE!
For those in the Philadelphia and surrounding areas (up to 50 miles from Philadelphia County) the best way is to be a member of Arsenal Philadelphia and make a request through our website. This will allow you to request the number of tickets you need, be seated together with all members of your party, and have the greatest chance of getting tickets.
Yes, there are several, but with significant differences from Arsenal Philadelphia:
A. Arsenal America: Arsenal America are fantastic organization and great friends of ours but for those in Philadelphia and surrounding areas, Arsenal Philadelphia is your official supporters’ club and ticket resource. Each organization has a separate ticket allocation; ours is specifically for fans in and around Philadelphia, so we’d ask that you use ours rather than take from the allocation for the rest of the US.
B. Emirates Box Office (requires Red membership from Arsenal FC): buying directly from the box office is perhaps the most difficult way for overseas fans to get tickets. You will need to purchase a Red membership from Arsenal FC (ENTIRELY different from a Red Membership from Arsenal Philadelphia). Red Arsenal FC members can only purchase one ticket per match. If you are traveling with friends or family, each of you will need a Red membership and you will each need to purchase a ticket in a separate transaction, making it impossible to get multiple tickets seated together. There are only a few thousand tickets available for Red members, they go on sale 30 days before the match at 4am Eastern time and they typically sell out in 5 to 15 minutes.
C. Arsenal Ticket Exchange (requires Red membership from Arsenal FC): Once the allocation of tickets for Red members is sold out, the Arsenal Ticket Exchange opens where season ticket holders can list their tickets for sale if they’re not going to use them. The same rules as the box office apply: one ticket per membership, purchased in separate transactions. There is no way to get multiple tickets together, and once listed a ticket typically sells within seconds.
D. Authorized Overseas Agent Ticket Sellers (OATs): There is a list of OATs on Arsenal.com. These agents are typically trustworthy, but they are very expensive. There are no set prices but we’ve heard from members who have dealt with OATs in the past being quoted as much as $600 per ticket.
E. Hospitality Packages: Arsenal offers hospitality packages directly through their website. Hospitality packages can be purchased by anyone regardless of membership status. Hospitality packages include your choice of a number of available VIP experiences, and prices vary based on what you choose. Hospitality packages start at about $250 per person and can go up to over $2000 per person.
It is 100% ILLEGAL for any entity to sell tickets to a football match in the UK other than the issuing club or an Authorized Agent of the issuing club. Third party sites can sell tickets to other types of events in the UK, but they are strictly prohibited from selling football tickets. As you may have heard, this doesn’t stop them from listing football tickets for sale, which is why they are also banned by Arsenal and their use can result in membership being terminated. So few if any supporters will risk their memberships to make a few bucks selling their tickets. Which means the vast majority of tickets you see on these sites are fakes, and each match there are dozens if not hundreds of overseas fans stuck outside the Emirates, holding fake tickets for which they paid hundreds over face value.
Ticket touting (known as scalping here in the US) is a serious problem for Arsenal and all Premier League and lower league clubs throughout the UK, which results in real fans losing out to touts when trying to buy tickets from the box office, and creates a market where overseas fans travel thousands of miles and spend thousands of dollars only to be disappointed at the entrance to the stadium. We strongly urge our members and other all other fans to avoid these sites and purchase tickets through legitimate, trustworthy sources.
There’s a deadline for requesting tickets, and it’s 70-days prior to the match.
The primary options would be through the box office, ticket exchange, or authorized overseas agents mentioned above. None of those options are ideal. In the past we have, with some success, used our many contacts in the UK to try to find tickets for our members even after the deadline had passed. But this year is just different. While we still welcome your requests and will do everything we can to help, we want to set realistic expectations: getting tickets after the 70-day deadline is next to impossible.
Arsenal categorizes matches into three price tiers, Category A being the highest and C the lowest. Prices start under $30 for a Category C match and can be as high as $130 for Category A. Arsenal Philadelphia is a supporters’ club, not a ticket agent, which is why we only take ticket requests from our members and we only charge you for the face value of the ticket(s) plus any transaction or exchange fees we might have incurred. Arsenal Philadelphia makes absolutely nothing from providing our members with tickets.
The only reliable and reasonably priced way to sit together with friends and family is to go through a Supporters’ Club like Arsenal Philadelphia. See the section above on purchasing from the Emirates Box Office or Arsenal Ticket Exchange for more details, but suffice to say that you can’t purchase multiple tickets seated together directly from Arsenal. Your options would be an authorized Overseas Agent Ticket Seller (who charge as much as $600 per ticket), a VIP Hospitality package from Arsenal ($200 to $2000 per person if you can get one), or Arsenal Philadelphia (tickets start under $30 and top out at $130 depending on the match).
There is a small number of tickets set aside for the global supporters’ club allocation. 70 days before the match, the tickets are split amongst the clubs who made requests. The algorithm for how much of the global allocation each club receives is a bit of a mystery, but we know that the more requests we make, the more we will be allocated in the future. So requesting tickets through Arsenal Philadelphia increases the chances of getting tickets to future matches for you and the rest of the club!