THE BEST WAY TO GET TICKETS TO THE EMIRATES, AND ANSWERS TO OTHER FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ARE HERE!
It is important to understand that in the UK, fair and affordable distribution of football tickets is protected both by the football clubs themselves and by UK law. There are only a few ways to get tickets that are legal and authorized by Arsenal. The best legal and authorized source for tickets for fans here in the US and most places around the world is an official supporters’ club.
For those in the Philadelphia and surrounding areas (up to 50 miles “as the crow flies” from Philadelphia County) Arsenal Philadelphia is your official supporters’ club.
Tickets for matches at the Emirates have become very difficult to obtain from any source, and official supporters’ clubs are no exception, but supporters’ clubs still give you the best chance of securing genuine tickets legally and at face value.
ITicket requests are only accepted via the ticket request form on arsenalphiladelphia.com. The ticket request form can be accessed through our store page, and it’s only visible to current, paid members of Arsenal Philadelphia who join or renew their memberships by September 30 of the current season. TICKETS REQUESTED VIA SOCIAL MEDIA, FACEBOOK MESSENGER, TEXT MESSAGE, EMAIL, OR ANY OTHER METHOD WILL NOT BE PROCESSED.
ONLY DUES-PAYING MEMBERS OF ARSENAL PHILADELPHIA WHO JOIN OR RENEW THEIR MEMBERSHIPS BY SEPTEMBER 30 OF THE CURRENT SEASON CAN REQUEST TICKETS.
As a member, you can request up to four tickets in one transaction, but ALL MEMBERS OF YOUR PARTY, INCLUDING CHILDREN OF ANY AGE, MUST BE MEMBERS OF ARSENAL PHILADELPHIA.
You must provide an email address to be associated with each ticket, and each of those email addresses must track back to a current Arsenal Philadelphia membership.
Yes, there are several, but with significant differences from Arsenal Philadelphia:
A. Arsenal America/NYC:
Arsenal America and NYC are fantastic organizations and great friends of ours but for those in Philadelphia and surrounding areas, Arsenal Philadelphia is your official supporters’ club and ticket resource.
While it may be tempting to join multiple supporters clubs and request tickets from them all to try to increase your chances of getting tickets, Arsenal does not allow that and they do cross reference the members’ names on the requests in random spot checks. If caught, the member could be banned from getting tickets to future matches. Here at Arsenal Philadelphia we check to make sure members requesting tickets are in our area and not just joining from afar to increase their chances for tickets.
We kindly ask that if you are within 50 miles of Philadelphia County you join Arsenal Philadelphia and request tickets from us rather than take from the allocation for NYC or the rest of the country. Likewise, if you live outside the Greater Philadelphia area, please join and request tickets from Arsenal America or Arsenal NYC rather than our club, as we need our allocation for our members here in the Philly area. If you are outside the Philadelphia area and want Arsenal Philadelphia swag, you can purchase many items from our logo shop which opens after September 30 each season.
B. Direct from Arsenal:
In order to get tickets directly from Arsenal you must purchase a Red membership from Arsenal FC (this is totally separate and different from membership in Arsenal Philadelphia). Because of high demand and to deter touts (known as scalpers here in the US), Arsenal now sells tickets via a lottery, called a ballot, for each match.
If you are traveling with friends or family and want to attend the match together, each member of your party will need their own Red membership; up to four Red Members can enter the ballot to be seated together. All members of your party must be selected in the ballot for any of you to get tickets.
Think of the ballot as a giant hat filled with the names of about 50,000 entrants for each match. If you have four people in your party, all four of your names are in that hat. Arsenal has about 3000 tickets for the Red Member ballot for each match, so they draw 3000 names from the hat, one at a time. If three of your names get drawn and the fourth one doesn’t, NONE of you get tickets. If they run out of groupings of four seats together before all of your names are drawn, NONE of you get tickets. So smaller groups and singles have a better chance of success in the ballot.
The results of the ballots for Red members are released much closer to the match than supporters’ club requests, which may make it difficult to book, alter, or cancel travel plans if your trip to London is dependent on the outcome of the ballot.
While the ballot is certainly a long shot, it’s still worth a shot if your request from Arsenal Philadelphia was unsuccessful (or you missed the deadline) and you’re going to be in London regardless of whether you find tickets.
C. Arsenal Ticket Exchange:
PLEASE NOTE: Starting this season, the Ticket Exchange is open ONLY to members who were unsuccessful in the ballot.
Once the ballot is over for Red members, the Arsenal Ticket Exchange opens where ticket holders can list their tickets for sale if they’re not going to use them. To get access to the exchange for any given match, you and all members of your party must be Red members of Arsenal FC, AND you must have applied for the ballot for that particular match and been unsuccessful.
Because there are so many people looking for tickets on the exchange, when tickets are listed they typically sell within seconds. Successfully getting tickets on the exchange typically involves staying logged in and repeatedly clicking refresh hoping tickets become available. To get multiple tickets together you have to wait for a grouping of the size you need to be listed on the exchange and try to grab them before anyone else does.
Because the exchange doesn’t open until after the Red members’ ballot is drawn, there’s even less time to arrange travel. If you do find tickets it could be days or even hours before the match. However, much like the ballot system discussed above, if you’re a Red member and you’re going to London either way, it certainly doesn’t hurt to keep your eye on the exchange.
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. They sell tickets as part of “VIP” packages so while the tickets may technically be sold for face value, the package you have to buy to get the ticket is MUCH more expensive. Prices vary match to match and season to season, but at the time of publishing this FAQ, the OATs were selling packages anywhere from $800 to over $1500 per person.
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 many thousands per person.
For most Premier League matches the deadline to request tickets is noon Eastern time on the 70th day prior to the date the match is scheduled to be played. The first few matches of the season, as well as domestic and European cup ties, have deadlines that are closer to the match date as many of these matches are scheduled only weeks or even days before they actually take place. Whatever the deadline, we have no choice but to adhere to it strictly as the deadlines are set by Arsenal and they do not make exceptions.
Not from us.
Again, Arsenal sets the hard deadline for supporters’ clubs to request tickets and they do not make exceptions.
You may still be able to enter the Red member ballot. If you missed the ballot then the ticket exchange will not be available to you, so your only remaining options are authorized overseas agents and hospitality packages. More info on this is in the answer to “Are there other sources for tickets?” above.
That said, we want to set realistic expectations: hospitality packages are almost always sold out months before a match and in the unlikely event an overseas agent still has tickets a few weeks before a match, the packages will be exorbitantly expensive.
Let us be totally clear: 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. And it is 100% ILLEGAL for any entity to re-sell or otherwise transfer ownership of tickets to a football match, even for face value or for free, unless it’s facilitated by the issuing club, like Arsenal does with the Ticket Exchange.
As you may have heard, this doesn’t stop people from listing football tickets on these sites, which is why Arsenal and many other clubs have instituted strict measures to check that tickets are being used by the individuals that legally acquired them. Violations can result in the original purchaser’s Arsenal membership being terminated and being denied future access to the stadium.
Few if any supporters will risk their memberships or season tickets to make a few extra bucks re-selling their tickets, hence the vast majority of tickets you see on these sites are fakes. While you may have heard “success” stories of people who bought tickets though a third party resale site, at each match there are dozens if not hundreds of overseas fans stuck outside the Emirates holding fake tickets. And with Arsenal’s recent switch to 100% digital ticketing with dynamic QR codes, the number of people denied access because of fraudulent tickets has increased dramatically.
Ticket touting is a serious problem for Arsenal and all football clubs throughout the UK, which results in real fans losing out to touts when trying to buy tickets, and creates a market for fraud that causes overseas fans to 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 all other fans to avoid third party resale sites and purchase tickets through the legitimate, trustworthy sources listed above.
Short answer: we charge exactly what the tickets cost us and make zero profit from getting tickets for our members.
Longer answer: Arsenal categorizes matches into three price tiers, Category A being the highest and C the lowest. Prices start under $80 for a Category C match and can be as high as $200 for Category A. Your final price will be the face value of the tickets based on the exchange rate of US dollars to British pounds on the day Arsenal issues the tickets, plus 6.5% to cover domestic and foreign transaction fees. If, due to variation in the exchange rate, there is a difference in your favor between what you paid and what we paid, we will credit you back the difference. Arsenal Philadelphia makes absolutely no profit from providing our members with tickets.
Typically you will receive approval or rejection approximately 60 days before the match. You will receive an email informing you either way.
If your request is approved, you will have until 30 days before the match to provide proof of travel arrangements WITH ARRIVAL NO LESS THAN TWO DAYS BEFORE AND DEPARTURE NO LESS THAN TWO DAYS AFTER THE MATCH, and a valid passport. This is both to ensure you can attend the match even if it is moved by a day or two for TV scheduling purposes (which happens frequently), and to ensure the requestor is personally going to London and attending the match, not attempting to get tickets for resale or for a third party.
If your request is rejected, and you chose to be added to the waiting list in the event of rejection, you will receive an email either when tickets become available, or shortly before the match to let you know we were unable to secure tickets for you.
Tickets are sent via email to the member who made the request. There are PDFs that can be printed and links to add the tickets to a digital wallet. You can use either method, but we recommend using the digital wallet as it is the most common method and from what we’ve heard, the easiest and fastest to scan at the entry kiosks. We also recommend bringing a print out or screenshot of the PDF as backup.
As an anti-touting measure (known as “scalping” here in the US), but also because the Emirates box office staff is so very busy, we often do not receive tickets until shortly before the match and we do not release tickets until the day before the match. Rest assured, if you’ve been told your ticket request was approved, you are 100% guaranteed to get tickets and they will be in your email before the match.
We have no way of knowing until the tickets are issued by Arsenal. Arsenal Philadelphia does not accept requests for specific seat locations and we do not guarantee specific seat locations. When you request tickets from Arsenal Philadelphia, you are agreeing to accept seats wherever in the stadium they might be available.
Historically our tickets have been on the upper tier in the southeast corner (Clock End) of the stadium. This season we have gotten tickets in the lower area of the Clock End as well. But there are no guarantees that we will continue to be seated there. With ticket demand being so high, getting any seat in the Emirates is cause for celebration regardless of location. Rest assured there is a great view of the pitch from every seat in the stadium.
Contact us RIGHT AWAY at info@arsenalphiladelphia.com and we will help you transfer your ticket(s) to another supporter. If you have already received the tickets via email, keep in mind that it is 100% ILLEGAL in the UK to resell your football tickets. You MUST contact us so we can enlist the help of the box office in transferring your tickets.
While it is our official policy that ticket requests can not be cancelled after they have been submitted, and refunds are only issued in the event the ticket request is rejected, we do not want the tickets to go to waste and demand is high enough that we can find someone to take tickets if you can’t use them, even with short notice. So again, please contact us RIGHT AWAY if your travel plans change so we can help you transfer the tickets legally.
Matches may be rescheduled by up to three days with very little notice. Match rescheduling by a up to a few days is not grounds for a refund. I’m order to receive tickets from Arsenal Philadelphia, you must plan your trip to the UK to accommodate the possibility of your match being moved by at least a day or two, or three if possible (we’ve recently seen a match move from a Saturday to the following Tuesday).
Planning to attend a match the day after you arrive in the UK or the day before you leave is NOT permitted. Approval of any ticket request is contingent on your providing Arsenal Philadelphia proof of travel with arrival and departure dates no less than two days from the current scheduled day of the match. If you do not provide proof of travel within 30 days of the match, tickets earmarked for you will be given to a member on the waiting list.
If a match is rescheduled by more than a few days (as we had a few seasons ago with the death of the Queen) you do have the option to keep the tickets in the event you can still make it to the match, but if not, Arsenal Philadelphia can enlist the help of the Emirates box office to move the tickets on for you. As we’ve mentioned several times in this FAQ, it is 100% ILLEGAL to resell your football tickets in the UK. If your match is rescheduled and you can’t make it, please contact us right away and we will transfer the tickets legally.
Supporters’ clubs do not get an allotment of tickets for away matches. The small number of away tickets (barely 1000 at the smaller stadiums) are allocated to loyal domestic supporters who for years religiously go to less desirable away fixtures (like League Cup ties on weekday evenings at obscure grounds in the farthest reaches of England) to accumulate enough points to qualify for tickets to Premier League away matches. Arsenal go to great lengths to make sure away tickets for Premier League matches go to these loyal members, as well they should. So unfortunately the chances of getting tickets to an away match as an overseas supporter are practically nil. The chances of Arsenal Philadelphia being able to help you get tickets to an away match are literally nil.
Supporters’ clubs do not get an allotment of tickets for Arsenal WFC matches, either. However standing room tickets for matches at Meadow Park and tickets for Arsenal WFC matches at the Emirates are relatively easy to come by; check arsenal.com for more information.