With around 58,000 tickets sold for Sunday’s top of the table clash with Chelsea, Arsenal Women boss Jonas Eidevall has urged fans to snap up the remaining tickets for a first ever sellout for a WSL game at Emirates Stadium.
Arsenal are regularly achieving attendances of 45-50,000 at the Emirates for Arsenal Women games now, having secured a sellout for last season’s Champions League semi-final second leg against Wolfsburg. Eidevall urged fans to snap up the last remaining tickets ahead of Sunday.
“I think we have to push and make it a sellout. The atmosphere that has been created by supporter groups like The Red And White, Arsenal Women supporter clubs, that’s what drives us to go into this stage here. We’re 2,000-ish tickets short of this being a sellout. Let’s push, you don’t want to miss it.”
Eidevall’s first WSL game in charge of the club in September 2021 was a game against Chelsea at the Emirates, 9,000 were in attendance that day. “This is where it comes into saying you might have visions, dreams, goals but the reality is, when I came two and a half seasons ago and we were playing Chelsea at the Emirates with less than 10,000 people, now we’re talking about a sellout, that’s tremendous growth.
“It’s down to so many people doing great work and that’s of course the players. Those are the ones that drive the excitement of the league and the matches, but also off the pitch the club’s commercial, communication departments, the supporters, everything comes together and you need everyone in order to get this growth. It can’t be driven by a few, it has to be driven by many.”
Arsenal have a stated ambition to make the Emirates the full-time home of the women’s team but Eidevall says there are some logistical obstacles to overcome before that can become a reality.
“I think you would hope that that would be closer than I think it actually might be. I think there is a lot of logistics in moving all games in the league to bigger stadiums because you have many different factors in everything from permits on how many games you’re allowed to play in a stadium, but also how do you have pitch maintenance and so on in congested periods of games?
“So I think there are a lot of logistics that you don’t necessarily think about. Especially if we see in the future, it’s probably likely that we will have more than 12 teams in the WSL, I think not for next season but if we look a decade forward, I think that certainly has to be the direction.
“That means more games, it means then even more demands on the stadium that the games are going to be played on, so I think that requires some really smart people getting together and having a think about how that will be possible. But you can see the progression that the club has been doing with playing more and more league games at the Emirates Stadium every year.
“Hopefully that’s a progression that continues but, like I said, there are so many different factors going into, say, how many games that we can play in a stadium, so I think we have to review it on a season-by-season basis, but you can clearly see the club’s intent in the progress that we’ve been making.”
Arsenal play Chelsea at the Emirates on Sunday at 12.30pm, the last few tickets are available here.
At this point I’d rather 95% of those with tickets use them, than it selling out
What’s the problem with having the women’s team play at the Emirates every game? I don’t see the problem. You can just arange it so the men’s team and women’s teams are always home/away on different weekends and it’s fine. AC Milan and Inter Milan have shared the San Siro for years so surely it is so much easier for Arsenal men and Arsenal women to share the Emirates permanently
58,000 or 60,000 – doesn’t matter. It’s still a huge number. I understand why this sort of thing is important and why the club are pushing it, but I prefer the team to focus on the performance rather than whether every single ticket is sold or not. The support will be there, I don’t want them to feel flat or disappointed if we fall short of the magic 60,000.
I can’t wait to go toe to toe with Chelsea. I loved Lia’s comments about not being sentimental about Emma Hayes. Quite right. We want to ruin her farewell season.
The support will be there…. and yes we want to ruin Hayes farewell….. after all, she’s always been bitter about not being chosen to replace Vic
I’m tried of them saying 60,000 is a sellout. Yes that’s good and they should try and do that normally but looking at a only 1/3 of the stadium full is not a sellout. Why are they trying to redefine words.
Yes a lot of sold seats in previous Big Stadium games were unused but no way on earth was it 2 thirds!?! Or even 1/3rd! You see gaps but not huge swathes of empty seats. And yes sell out doesn’t mean full, but it does mean you sold all the tickets!
Any event has a few different numbers. distributed, sold, turnstile count. Club tend to shout about the biggest number. I think other clubs give out a turnstile count. Sellout is selling the tickets you made available for sale. Club has only said Wolfsburg semi-final was a sellout for womens team playing at Emirates. a number of factors mean the womens team games have a higher % of no shows. Price/time changes that some didn’t know was likely/ higher % planning on bringing children(one member of family could get a minor sickness) I don’t know of any game they said was… Read more »