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How to get England tickets for Euro 2024: Three Lions fans must register for showpiece tournament after group stage draw confirmed

• Jack Johnson
• Published : 10:09, 5 Dec 2023
• Updated : 10:09, 5 Dec 2023

The Euro 2024 group stage draw has been made and England now know who they will be facing in their opening three games.

The Three Lions are in Group C along with Denmark, Slovenia and Serbia with the latter set to be their first opponents at the tournament on June 16.

Now that the groups are confirmed , the showpiece tournament feels much more real and fans will already be starting to feel the buzz. 

Many England supporters will be keen on making the short trip to Germany to be at the games for what could be a special summer for Gareth Southgate’s side.

How to get England tickets for Euro 2024

Before Euro 2020 there was a record amount of interest in tickets for the tournament, with around 28 million people requesting them.

It is reported to be similar for Euro 2024 which will make it very hard for fans to get tickets to be there in Germany.

READ MORE ON EURO 2024

England's route to Euro 2024 glory revealed but one slip-up could be disastrous

England become Euro 2024 favourites with group that should make Southgate 'very happy'

To get tickets, supporters have to create an application via their national association before making their purchase on the UEFA website .

England fans who are part of the England Supporters Travel Club will have a chance to pre-register and then be entered into a ballot for tickets.

Fans with more ‘caps’ as an England Supporters Travel Club member will have a better chance of being successful in the ballot.

Full details on how to apply for England tickets can be found here .

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All you need to know about Serbia vs England as Three Lions begin quest for Euro glory

What are the kick-off times at Euro 2024? Fixture schedule and TV channels for each day

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England 3-1 Italy LIVE REACTION: Kane bags double at Wembley to seal Euro 2024 place

Alternatively, you can apply for tickets on the UEFA website, however, priority sales go to the England Supporters Travel Club.

Fans can apply for up to four tickets each for one match per day at the tournament.

There are three ticketing windows where fans can buy them, with one already taking place in October when 1.2 million tickets were made available.

Successful applicants were then informed about their tickets in November. 

The second window opened after the draw on December 2, and fans can create an application for tickets up until December 12. 

One million tickets will be available to supporters of the qualified nations and the lottery draw for the tickets will be completed by January.

There will be a final ticket window in March and April when the last batch of tickets are sold to fans from qualified nations.

A resale platform will also be opened up in spring 2024 so fans can buy unwanted tickets at resale value.

Euro 2024 ticket prices

UEFA have split the prices of the tickets into stages, with the group games costing less than the knockouts for example. 

Each game is also put into a category, with Category 1 games costing more than a Category 3 match. 

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Group stage tickets cost from £26.74 up to £174.91 depending on the category while for the knockout stages, tickets cost from £42.73 up to £524.79 depending on the category and round.

Tickets for the final can cost up £874.58 but the cheapest option is around £81. 

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England – Rugby World Cup 2023

The only uk official travel agent with a base in france.

Follow England at Rugby World Cup 2023 with the only UK Official Travel Agent with a base in France – MSG Tours.

Our packages vary from our Long Weekenders in the host cities to our Double Downs and   Le Triple which spans the first three games of the Pool phase.

Double Down 1 & 2

Marseille > Toulon > Nice

England v Argentina – Marseille England v Japan – Nice

Long Weekender – Marseille

England v Argentina – Marseille

Long Weekender – Club Med – 5*

England v Argentina – Marseille South Africa v Scotland – Marseille

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England v Americas 2- Lille

Long Weekender – Nice

England v Japan- Nice Wales v Qualifier – Nice

Long Weekender – Monaco

Marseille > Toulon > Nice > Lyon > Lille

England v Argentina – Marseille England v Japan – Nice England v Americas 2 – Lille

Double Down 4 & QF

Lille> Lyon> Marseille 

England v Samoa – Lille Quarter-Final 1 – Marseille Quarter-Final 2 – Marseille

Double Down 2 & 3 (A)

Nice > Lyon > Lille

England v Japan – Nice England v Americas 2 – Lille

Double Down 2 & 3 (B)

Nice > Paris > Lille

Please read Rugby World Cup France 2023’s  Ticketing Terms and Conditions

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To find out more, call us on 03333 110335 or email [email protected]

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• Malta v England 2023

Malta v England

UEFA European Qualifier Thursday 23 March 2023 Ta' Qali Stadium, Malta

UEFA European Qualifier

England men travel to Malta for a UEFA Nations League fixture at Ta' Qali Stadium

These tickets are only available to members of the England Supporters Travel Club.

England Supporters Travel Club Sold out

Ticket Price and Details

Category 3: 4,025 Wheelchair/Companion: 5/5 EasyAccess/Companion: tbc

Price:  £29.00

Companion tickets will be complimentary.

Disabled Access

If you were successful in the ballot for a Wheelchair/companion ticket you will not need to purchase this online.  A member of the team will call you to take payment.

If you applied for 'Easy Access' tickets and were successful, please email us directly at [email protected] once you have purchased your tickets outlining your specific needs and we will do our best to accommodate you on match day.

Regulations

As a member of the England Supporters Travel Club you are expected to abide with the  'Rules of Membership'  when travelling abroad to support the Three Lions.

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Echoes of errors: why has VAR sparked so much fury this season?

There have been some glaring mistakes by VAR but it also appears to have increased officiating standards on the pitch

S even months ago Englandthe country came the closest yet to entering thermonuclear war over a refereeing decision. When the referee Simon Hooper mistakenly ruled out a Luis Díaz goal at Tottenham for offside and the Video Assistant Referee Darren England failed to correct him, the initial response was heated and only bubbled up from there.

“They said it was significant, that’s very significant,” said Gary Neville on Sky at full time when a Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL) statement dropped acknowledging “ significant human error ” in ruling out the goal. “It makes you wonder how many others they’ve got wrong as well,” chipped in Jamie Redknapp.

The next morning, Liverpool released a statement arguing “sporting integrity had been undermined”, the supporters’ group Spirit of Shankly said that “VAR and PGMOL are not fit for purpose” and the club’s former striker John Aldridge alleged corruption. On the Monday, Ed Balls and Susanna Reid discussed the incident on Good Morning Britain and we were spared the public indignation of MPs only because parliament was in recess.

As the season approaches its end and Liverpool prepare to play Spurs again on Sunday, we can look back on this incident as from a different time, but only because frenetic denunciation of referees and VAR is bog standard. This week we learned the VAR Stuart Attwell had got two of three contentious penalty calls correct during Nottingham Forest’s recent defeat by Everton. But that hadn’t stopped Forest stating within an hour of the final whistle that they “could not accept” Attwell’s decisions, had “warned the PGMOL that the VAR is a Luton fan ” and were “considering [their] options”.

The Tottenham-Liverpool error was an egregious one and the approach of Forest towards refereeing is particularly combative. The club is so concerned about officiating that it employed the former Premier League official Mark Clattenburg as a consigliere until he resigned on Friday saying his role had caused “unintended friction” with other clubs and he had become “more of a hindrance than a help”. But echoes of these two extreme examples of VAR errors are heard most weeks, be it from managers, pundits or fans. Why is that?

It helps that there is a stream of errors to which critics can attach their ire. Hooper has had a particularly lumpy season, also failing to award Wolves a legitimate penalty in the opening game week, before denying Manchester City a potentially crucial advantage in their 3-3 tussle with Spurs in December, halting play with Jack Grealish bearing down on goal. Even the Premier League’s best referees have had their moments; Michael Oliver, who will officiate at the European Championship this summer, missed a clear penalty foul in the north London derby only last weekend. His boss, Howard Webb, said Oliver would be “disappointed” with his oversight.

However, if you were to take from this that refereeing standards are falling, you would be wrong. According to mid-season statistics shared by the Premier League’s chief football officer, Tony Scholes, standards have never been higher. “Before VAR 82% of the decisions made were deemed to be ­correct,” Scholes said. “In the season so far, that ­figure is 96%.” Equally, there have been fewer interventions by VAR this season than last and fewer errors by VAR, including occasions when there should have been an intervention and was not. As one official put it this week, the accuracy of decision-making is higher than Declan Rice’s accuracy of passing, but to many it clearly doesn’t feel that way.

On the TV show Match Officials Mic’d Up this week Webb sought to make the point that not only are refereeing errors human errors, those made by VARs are too. This is a necessary clarification because it’s feasible and perhaps even understandable that people don’t see it that way. VAR is a phrase used not only to describe a person’s role but an entire system and it’s the system that people don’t like.

Multiple camera angles, blue and red lines administered by cursor point, 3D rendering of body parts with offending areas highlighted, the finger pressing on the earpiece. All give the impression of an added layer of complexity having been added to a game beloved for its simplicity. Add to that the life-diminishing lengths of time it can take for a video adjudication to be delivered and for many, especially match-going supporters, VAR has always felt like a counterproductive initiative.

For others, many of whom are inside the game, the change was necessary. With so much riding on the outcome of matches, it was crucial mistakes were eliminated wherever possible. VAR has had great success in eliminating error but it has not been a panacea. This too appears to be a source of abiding frustration.

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The PGMOL and Premier League have acknowledged that the experience for fans has not been good enough. To change things, Webb wants to expand communication within the stadium, with the likelihood that from next season referees will be allowed to announce why a decision has been overturned by VAR. Semi-automated offside technology will be introduced at some point next season to speed up decision-making and stop people having to draw fiddly lines (with as yet unexpected problems no doubt produced instead).

That these changes are not in place yet is probably another reason prompting antipathy; improvements in the VAR experience have been too slow in coming. Further adaptations will be as hard to deliver, including the ability to broadcast conversations between a referee and VAR so crowds have a full understanding of what is going on. This is the prize Webb most wants but something the law-making body, the International Football Association Board (Ifab), seems set against.

Communication is a key thread for Webb. It’s what he instituted when successfully introducing VAR to the United States (it helps that it’s a country whose sports are commonly peppered with breaks). It’s what he has achieved with Mic’d Up, an informative monthly show that is effectively clipped up for social media. But he is running to catch up because of a crucial error: the failure on day one to clearly explain what VAR is for.

From one angle it is simple: VAR is there to remove the most consequential errors, those that lead to goals (or no goals), penalties and red cards. But it’s also true that, in England at least, no one wants the VAR to supersede the on-field referee. So we have the dictum that the VAR, other than for offsides, is supposed to engage only in the case of “clear and obvious” errors. But most refereeing decisions contain subjective elements, meaning one person’s clear and obvious error could be another’s marginal call. All this leads to a situation where, in 2024, Jürgen Klopp could say after a draw with Manchester City in which his side had appeared to be denied a penalty: “Isn’t it [VAR] there for making the right decision and not thinking how high a bar you have to overcome to find the right decision?” (The answer? Well, no).

Webb’s task is one not only of communication but of training and upskilling. To that end, PGMOL has sought to promote talented officials up the pyramid, such as Sunny Singh Gill who became the first British south Asian to referee a Premier League match in March. It is also expanding the pool of VAR officials by reaching out to English Football League and Women’s Super League referees. Once appointed these officials receive more training, evaluation and feedback than they did even three years ago. These changes will take time to deliver on the pitch and even then there’s a sense it won’t be enough.

Search “VAR corruption” on YouTube and you will find no shortage of gaudy thumbnails promising conspiracy and outrage. Watch a sports channel or listen to the radio and you will hear similar. A manager’s pre- or post-match press conference too. An apparently simple idea, of using technology to facilitate better refereeing decisions, has turned out to be complex and created a number of unintended consequences. One of those is that the nexus of technology, officialdom and football has proved to be catnip for controversialists, and it may be too late to put that particular feline back in the bag.

• Video assistant referees (VARs)
• Laws of football
• Tottenham Hotspur

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When a Bunch of Bloody Yanks Came for English Soccer

American investors are gobbling up the storied teams of the English Premier League — and changing the stadium experience in ways that soccer fans resent.

Spectators at a Premier League match between Aston Villa and Bournemouth in Birmingham in April. Credit... Alexander Coggin for The New York Times

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By Bruce Schoenfeld

Bruce Schoenfeld is a frequent contributor to the magazine and the author of “Game of Edges: The Analytics Revolution and the Future of Professional Sports.”

• May 4, 2024

In the first half of a January game at Stamford Bridge, the London stadium where the Chelsea Football Club has played since its founding in 1905, seven well-groomed spectators in green velvet jackets stood up together from their seats behind the substitutes’ bench as players raced up and down the field in front of them. They pulled out books and began to read. Then they all brushed their teeth.

Listen to this article, read by Robert Fass

The publicity stunt turned out to be a promotion for the film “Argylle,” which would be released a few weeks later. The use of a Premier League game in a packed stadium as the backdrop was criticized in the English media as yet another transgression by Todd Boehly, an American investor and the most prominent figure among Chelsea’s owners. Boehly, who also owns a sizable piece of the Los Angeles Dodgers, probably saw it as simply another way to generate revenue — no different than putting advertising on shirt fronts, which English clubs have been doing since the 1970s — and something that would be considered part of the spectacle of sports in America.

In England, though, many fans perceived it as the further desecration of a cornerstone of national culture: a soccer club’s being treated as an investment to be exploited by a gauche American owner. “That may be fine in U.S. sports,” Pat Nevin, a popular Chelsea player in the 1980s who worked for the club until the end of last season, told me. “But to a football fan, that hurts.” A few months after leaving Chelsea, Nevin went on the BBC to warn against the prospect of adopting a popular feature at many American sports venues. “I told them, ‘No, no, don’t do a Kiss Cam,’” he says. “ ‘Such a small thing, but you can’t imagine the reaction you’re going to get.’”

The unabashed attempts to Americanize the English soccer experience range from musical acts as pregame entertainment to the addition of club seats — with waiter service and lounge access — and members-only bars inside stadiums. Later this year, the London club Fulham, which is owned by the Pakistani American businessman Shahid Khan, will unveil a $200 million-plus expansion that includes a stand overlooking the Thames, restaurants curated by a Michelin-starred chef, a street-level produce market and a boutique hotel and spa with an outdoor swimming pool — an attraction also found at the stadium of Khan’s N.F.L. team, the Jacksonville Jaguars. The expectation that such “improvements” mean higher ticket prices led to a fan boycott of a recent game. “People here hold football very, very dearly,” says Nedum Onuoha, who grew up in Manchester and played professionally for several English clubs, before moving to Real Salt Lake in Major League Soccer. “They don’t like change.”

The antecedent to such change occurred in 2005, when the first Americans to buy a Premier League club — Malcolm Glazer and his sons, who owned the N.F.L.’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers — acquired control of Manchester United. Almost immediately, other wealthy Americans set out to get clubs of their own. Nearly all of them already had sports teams in the United States. They figured they could bring their successful business practices to English soccer, which in many ways was stuck in the 1960s. Fans were going to games in decades-old stadiums with hard wooden seats and squalid bathrooms. The fare at concession stands was almost exclusively beer and reheated meat pies.

This season, nine of the 20 Premier League clubs are owned by Americans. The sale of a 10th awaits approval. All of them, you could argue, are being run far more professionally than ever, as the billion-dollar businesses that many have become. Yet most of the Americans spotted in the owners’ box from time to time — or, worse, seldom spotted there at all — are disdained by their club’s fans. The sentiment is easy to appreciate. Imagine Chinese businessmen, say, quickly coming to control half the teams in the N.F.L., a situation that would probably spark congressional hearings. The concern would be cultural as well as economic: How could foreign investors truly understand this integral piece of Americana when they didn’t grow up hearing the stentorian voice of John Facenda narrating slow-motion highlights, or watching Detroit Lions games in the tryptophan haze of a Thanksgiving afternoon?

Now imagine that pro football has been the country’s defining leisure activity for 150 years. “We’ve reached a point,” Onuoha says, “where there is something of a stigma against American ownership.”

At Manchester United, fans regularly gather before games to protest against the Glazers, who have burdened the club with debt (now exceeding $990 million) yet regularly take dividends for themselves out of the annual revenue. At Arsenal, the owner is Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, which has teams in the N.F.L., N.B.A., N.H.L. and M.L.S. “We had our American owner, who everyone hated,” Nick Hornby, the author and noted Arsenal supporter, told me. “People used to bring banners: ‘Kroenkes Out!’” (The anger has subsided as the team’s performance has improved.)

Boehly arrived at Chelsea in May 2022 as the epitome of the cocksure American owner, a Ted Lasso of the boardroom. “A man who has looked at football and thought, ‘This is a business which is straightforward and simple — and because I’m so smart in so many other aspects of life, I can handle this,’” is how Graeme Souness, the former Liverpool captain and manager, characterized him in The Daily Mail. Boehly started his tenure at Chelsea by suggesting improvements to the Premier League — adding an All-Star Game, for instance. After the departure of the two executives who had been handling player acquisitions, the English equivalents of an American general manager, he took their place. More than $1 billion later, Chelsea owns the contracts of 25 new players. Currently it is closer to losing its spot in the Premier League than it is to winning the competition.

That’s one reason for Chelsea supporters’ discontent. Another is the wanton pursuit of profit that has altered the club’s relationship with its most loyal followers. Henry Winter, one of England’s most respected soccer journalists, wrote in The Times of London recently that Boehly is “rebranding the club into a business where the sport feels almost secondary.” Consider one example: The club-subsidized buses that used to deliver Chelsea fans to distant corners of England for a nominal fee — standard practice among Premier League teams — have been discontinued this season, forcing fans to rely on trains that often stop service for the day before evening games end. “What they are doing is what great businessmen always do,” David Chidgey, a lifelong Chelsea fan who hosts a podcast about the club, says of Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, a co-owner and principal of the private equity firm Clearlake Capital. “They exploit opportunities and exploit their environments.”

Chidgey acknowledges that Boehly would be perceived differently were Chelsea playing as well as it had over the past two decades, when it was owned by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and won five Premier League titles. But the nature of sports is cyclical; even the richest and smartest clubs inevitably experience disappointing seasons. “And if you get rid of the culture, what do you have during those times when you’re not winning?” Chidgey asks. “You don’t have anything.”

It was probably inevitable that venture capitalists and hedge-fund managers would discover English soccer. The clubs, from the famous ones to those in leagues further down that have plumbers and shop clerks playing part time, enjoy support that most American teams can only envy; they all have the emotional stickiness of the Dallas Cowboys, or even Notre Dame football. It doesn’t hurt that they seem wildly undervalued compared with other sports investments. To take just one example, the San Diego team entering M.L.S. next year, a league that’s 30 years old, is paying a $500 million expansion fee to join; Bill Foley, the owner of the Vegas Golden Knights in the N.H.L., paid less than a third of that in 2022 to buy A.F.C. Bournemouth, a team founded in 1899 that currently sits in the middle of the Premier League standings.

At the same time, underpriced tickets and bad food have provided a significant opportunity for economic growth — “low-hanging fruit,” as investors tended to describe it. So has the propensity of English fans to arrive moments before games and leave right after. Get them to spend more time at the stadium, like their American counterparts, and they might have a meal there. They might linger at an expanded club shop selling branded versions of everything from license-plate frames to dog beds. An N.B.A. owner once told me that a successful sports team should be a kind of mutual fund of businesses, across categories that include entertainment, digital content, apparel, hospitality, even real estate. Until recently, most English soccer clubs were in one business: staging games. And they didn’t do it particularly well.

But as American owners have sought to optimize their investments, they have found that many fans in England do not want to be reminded that their soccer clubs are in any businesses at all. Their relationship with their clubs is far different than fandom is across the Atlantic, a product of the way sports in each country evolved. Aston Villa was founded in Birmingham in 1874 by four members of a Bible class; Arsenal started in 1886 as a recreation for munitions workers. These were private clubs, but also societal assets that gave communities a reason to gather on Saturday afternoons. “Football clubs have always been owned by rich people, usually rich English people,” Hornby says. “But it was done in a very old-fashioned, gentlemanly way.”

That’s not the case in the United States, where professional sports teams were organized as companies — in a sense, branch offices of a single company. (There’s a reason we call them franchises.) Teams displayed city names on their uniforms, and often played in stadiums funded by taxpayers, but there was never any illusion that they belonged to anyone but the businessmen who owned them. Every so often, those teams would leave their city for another one — even some of the most popular teams, like basketball’s Lakers, or baseball’s Dodgers and Giants, or football’s Raiders. That has happened only once to any team of note in the long history of English soccer, two decades ago, and the outrage it engendered has not yet subsided.

By the early 2000s, the skyrocketing values of American sports teams were starting to attract a new kind of investor, one who was not necessarily drawn by love of sport or civic pride or even ego gratification as much as by economic potential. “If you went back and looked at N.B.A. owners in 1980, they were the local Budweiser distributor, or they owned car dealerships, or they’d been successful in real estate,” says Wes Edens, the owner of the N.B.A.’s Milwaukee Bucks, who partnered with the Egyptian businessman Nassef Sawiris six years ago to buy Aston Villa. “And that might have been OK when your franchise cost $20 million. Once it becomes a billion-dollar business, though, it’s no longer a hobby. And the financial demands of a billion-dollar business are so different. And so, what’s happened is a very natural changeover, from the local guy who ran a car dealership to the guy who ran an equity fund” — someone like Edens himself.

Aston Villa was on the verge of bankruptcy and had fallen into English soccer’s second tier when Edens and Sawiris bought it. During the 2018-19 season, their first, the club earned promotion back to the Premier League. After the deft hires of a sporting director and manager, Villa has emerged as a winner. With four games left in the season, it sat in fourth place, a position that would put it into next season’s Champions League with Europe’s best teams. “We were facing extinction, one of the biggest clubs in English football history,” says John McGinn, a starting midfielder for Villa. “And we’ve had an owner come in and completely transform it. So I don’t know why anyone would be against that. No matter what happens, we should always be grateful to Wes.”

And yet, some of Villa’s fans remain contemptuous of him. In September an all-you-can-eat dining area opened at Villa Park; its offerings before and after games include hot dogs, nachos, ice cream and candy, beer and wine. When I spoke with fans around Birmingham, I was surprised to hear nearly everyone mention that as a misstep. “Listen when it gets advertised during the game,” said Charlie Nash, a 22-year-old who has attended games with his father, Paul, all his life. “You’ll hear a lot of people booing.” Nash also seemed resentful that his area of the stands, Villa Park’s equivalent of baseball’s bleachers, had gone corporate. These days, he said, when someone launches into a witty adaptation of a popular melody to celebrate their team or belittle the opposition, as English fans tend to do, those in the adjacent, newly upgraded section stay silent. “Maybe they don’t know the songs,” Nash said. “That’s a worry going forward. You start to lose the DNA.”

Like Boehly, Edens made his fortune running funds and investing in companies. On his first day as a Wall Street trader, he had an epiphany: This is what he was meant to do. “I liked the pace of it,” he says. “I liked the math of it. And honestly, I liked the risk.” In 1996, while working for the investment firm BlackRock, he purchased a portfolio of houses from the British government. Before that, he’d had little exposure to soccer. “I grew up in Montana, where there was probably not one soccer pitch in the entire state,” he says. “Now, all of a sudden, I was in England week after week. And every weekend, there were games. And I went to them.”

In 2014, having founded his own investment firm and become a billionaire, Edens bought the Bucks with a partner. (He also started an energy company and began developing Brightline, a high-speed railroad.) When Aston Villa came on the market in 2018, he consulted with David Blitzer, who owns parts of teams in all five major North American leagues, as well as Crystal Palace in the Premier League. Blitzer was encouraging, but he cautioned Edens that the habits of English fans were ingrained. That doesn’t mean you can’t win them over, Blitzer says. “But it takes longer.”

At the time when Edens and Sawiris were considering buying Aston Villa, the club was in English soccer’s equivalent of a minor league, playing teams like Barnsley and Preston North End rather than Chelsea and Arsenal. The situation reminded Edens of all the subprime loans and distressed companies he had acquired for below market value. Late in his first season, Villa won 10 consecutive games — a rare feat — and ended up being promoted back to the Premier League. After three seasons in the bottom half of the standings, it improved to seventh last year.

The next jump, becoming a regular presence in the Champions League, will be formidable, especially because soccer has strict limitations on how much owners can spend without generating offsetting revenues. In 2021, the club sold the attacking midfielder Jack Grealish, who entered Villa’s youth program when he was 6, to Manchester City. The $121 million it received enabled it to sign several significant players who form the core of the current team. But Aston Villa also lost close to $150 million in 2023, and the club has no more Grealishes to sell.

To increase its revenue, and to keep as much of his winning team intact as possible, Edens is planning to develop the neighborhood around Villa Park. In Milwaukee, he and his partners transformed 30 acres of vacant urban land into a thriving arena district, anchored by a sports bar and a boutique hotel. The neighborhood in Birmingham where the club plays, called Aston, isn’t quite as desolate, but when I drove through its streets with Edens one afternoon, its poverty was evident. Eventually, Edens told me, he hopes to build hundreds of apartment units there, as Blitzer and his partners are proposing to do in Philadelphia, where they own the N.B.A.’s 76ers. “Real estate is a big part of this because of the incremental revenue you can generate,” Blitzer says.

As a first step, an abandoned indoor cricket center near Aston Villa’s stadium will be converted into the Warehouse at Villa Park: dining for 3,000 people, a museum, a supersize team shop and a venue for private events. That plan has met with resistance from nearby residents who insist that weekends are loud and chaotic enough, and also from longtime supporters who are concerned that it will alter the match-going experience. “But the feeling is that the owners have their own thoughts on what to do,” Paul Nash says, “and will just do what they want.”

Edens isn’t daunted. Over dinner one night, he told me about a hotel that he recently built in Jackson Hole, Wyo. The project included a club where members could store skis and have their cars parked by valets. Everyone, including partners, told him it wouldn’t work. “A lot of the locals said, ‘That’s not Jackson Hole, that’s not true to our heritage,’” Edens said. “ ‘We’re not Vail. We carry our own stuff.’” He disagreed. “Who thinks carrying your three young kids’ ski stuff through a parking lot is a good idea?”

Edens proceeded with the ski club. “And people love it,” he said. “It’s completely sold out. And that’s how I feel about some of the other things that we’re doing now.” While he said that he is respectful of the club’s long history, he added that it’s “OK to change things a little bit. The Kiss Cam may not be the right way to do it. But other ways might be.”

At the end of April, Chelsea played Aston Villa in Birmingham. What was once a novelty, a match between teams with American owners, has grown commonplace; there will be 72 such games this season. That number, the most ever, could increase significantly if certain results fall into place. Three teams move into the Premier League from the level below each year: the top two finishers and the winner of a tournament involving the next four. (To make room for them, three teams also drop out.) Going into the last weekend of April, Leeds United, which belongs to the San Francisco 49ers’ owner Jed York and his partners, was in second place. Ipswich Town, owned by an American investment firm, was third. And Shilen Patel, a Tampa entrepreneur, recently completed the purchase of fifth-place West Bromwich Albion.

If a proposed sale of Everton to a Miami-based firm is approved, as many as 13 of the 20 clubs could be owned by Americans next season. That’s one short of the two-thirds supermajority that would have the power to remake the Premier League along the contours of, say, the N.F.L. A cap on player wages could be imposed, which would greatly benefit the competitive prospects of midsize clubs like Aston Villa. Gate receipts and the income from merchandise like shirt sales could be shared. Even the promotion-and-relegation system that has formed the basis of English soccer’s organizational system for more than a century could be eliminated. Gary Neville, a former Manchester United player and now a commentator on Sky Sports, has called American owners “a clear and present danger” to the game’s “fabric.”

And yet, some degree of evolution toward the American model seems inevitable, whether Americans are involved or not. If clubs are being run these days less like the corner bar and more like complicated international businesses, it’s because that is what they have become. When the Glazers agreed recently to sell 25 percent of Manchester United to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a lifelong supporter of the club and the chairman of the INEOS chemicals group, for $1.3 billion, he proposed replacing Old Trafford, as close to hallowed grounds as there is in English soccer, with a 90,000-seat stadium. In doing so, Ratcliffe was acting like an American, as one commenter put it, responding to a BBC article.

At Villa Park one afternoon, I went with Edens to visit the Lower Grounds, the all-you-can-eat dining area. Chris Heck, the club’s chief executive who formerly worked for the N.B.A.’s 76ers, suggested the idea for it shortly after he arrived in Birmingham last August. Touring the stadium, he stumbled on a decrepit ballroom-size space where ticket holders were permitted to gather. During the first game that the new venture was open for business, Heck says someone approached him on the concourse and took a swing at him — “because I took away the free space where he used to come and eat his sandwich.”

After hearing how unpopular it was among supporters, I expected a dreary scene of a few people sitting at otherwise empty tables. Instead, the area was filled to capacity with some 800 fans. They were eating and drinking while a game played on several large screens. They certainly appeared to be enjoying themselves. According to Heck, the club would make 80,000 British pounds, or about $100,000, that afternoon. “We fill it up every game, so multiply that by 23,” he says.

Some of that money would doubtless end up being spent on making Aston Villa better: on players; or on importing more of the plyometric machines like the ones that Edens’s Bucks use in Milwaukee into Villa’s training facility; or on the scouting budget, perhaps. Lower Grounds would help defray the cost of trying to compete against some of the wealthiest owners and entities in the world. It would also, in some incremental way, make the business more valuable.

Those were ancillary benefits, but Edens insisted to me that they weren’t quite the point. He was convinced that the all-you-can-eat venue would improve the experience of attending a match, just as he felt confident that relieving the burden of the skiers trying to haul their kids’ stuff across the parking lot would be welcomed by club members at his Jackson Hole hotel. “Our fans are like, ‘We like tradition,’” Edens said. “And I tell them: ‘No, you don’t. You think you do, but you don’t.’ I mean, who doesn’t like a big-screen TV with plenty of food and beer?” Then he spread his arms wide and answered his own question: “Nobody.”

Read by Robert Fass

Narration produced by Anna Diamond

Engineered by David Mason

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Rugby World Cup 2023

England Flight + Ticket Packages

Follow England at Rugby World Cup 2023

Follow England ’s Rugby World Cup France 2023 Pool D matches live with MSG on our official England flight and ticket packages.  

From Marseille to Nice, our Official Travel Agent status give you the opportunity to experience England games throughout the Rugby World Cup France 2023 tournament.  

Available Packages

Marseille. 4 days.

• Outbound charter flight London Stansted to Marseille (08/09/2023)
• Departure: (xxxxh)
• Arrival: (xxxxh)
• Inbound charter flight Marseille to London Stansted (11/09/2023)
• Cat 3 Official match ticket: England v Argentina
• EXCLUSIVE access to 1 x MSG pre-game l'apero event

Overall Price £898pp

Nice. 4 Days

• Inbound charter flight Birmingham to Nice (15/09/2023)
• Inbound charter flight Nice to Birmingham (18/09/2023)
• Cat 3 Official match ticket: England v Japan

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MSG Tours Ltd Announces Exciting Partnership with Glamorgan Cricket Club

We are thrilled to announce our new partnership with Glamorgan Cricket Club for the upcoming T20 season. As part of this collaboration, we will serve as a proud kit sponsor, with our logo prominently featuring on the collar of the team’s new Vitality Blast 2024 shirt.  This partnership marks an exciting development for us as it is our first venture into…

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Fantastic company. been on several tours with msg, and ever one has been fantastic. expect the unexpected, two rugby world cups, several six nations matches and various other assorted events with the msg team. fantastic team, great organisation, once-in-a-lifetime experiences and lots of fun, i travelled with msg to lyon and to nantes for the rugby world cup in france and had a superb time. all the staff were friendly and really went out of their way to provide us all with the very best experience. it’s always the little things. big thank you msg, went on the recent rugby world cup final trip and found everything to be well organised and as expected. we enjoyed the pre match event with good speakers and lucy was a perfect host., organisation and itinerary were great. the perfect mix of group time vs individual freedom. the boat after the match worked well. the train back with the french supporters was a one-off experience. we need to produce an msg tour songbook brilliant weekend., the surprises on the tour were delivering the unexpected. i loved the size of the group and the boutique nature of the tour., great: msg staff- the personal touch is very evident and greatly appreciated, the companionship of fellow supporters, the excursions and cultural stuff, and the local tour guides were good. hotel location and quality especially rome., we loved the wine tasting, not something we had ever done before but it was a brilliant addition to the itinerary. the tour guide on the walking tour of florence showed passion and enthusiasm which was unrivaled, and his local knowledge and history stories brought to life the sights we saw., excellent service, staff amazing went over and beyond to make sure the best time was had. the vineyard tour was the highlight, just wasn’t expecting this high standard. the room for lunch was beautiful and a fabulous lunch too, the wine wasn’t bad either, this felt like more than 'just a rugby tour'. the experiences that msg provided us with had been carefully researched and designed to be different. i know how much hard work goes into delivering events and experiences, and it was clear how much hard work and care went in to 'making the magic happen'. that hard work and those sacrifices did not go unseen. this tour was more than my teenage son and i ever could have expected, and gave us memories and friends that will stay with us forever. thank you., great tour - i have already booked the italy 6 nations tour in 2023 with msg, so we are a returning customer, which says it all. thanks for a great time, the whole tour from beginning to end was fantastic. nothing was ever too much trouble, hotels great, excursions unforgettable. a trip i will always remember as simply fantastic, there were so many highlights for me on this tour that there isn’t enough room to list them. a fantastic experience that i will never forget. cannot praise mark and his team enough for making this a magical trip. thank you , the end of this amazing tour has arrived: i have met lovely people who have become friends quickly; 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Arsenal pre-season 2024/25: Fixtures and schedule

• Arsenal could start their 2024/25 pre-season campaign as Premier League champions
• The Gunners have several friendlies lined up at present with more to come
• North London side will travel to North America as part of their preparations

By Ewan Ross-Murray | 3:00 AM GMT+1

Arsenal don't have much time to think about their 2024/25 pre-season plans right now.

The Gunners are still hunting a first Premier League title in two decades during the 2023/24 campaign and could well head into next season as the champions of England. Regardless of silverware, Mikel Arteta's side have been fantastic this year.

However, they have the chance to build an even more formidable side this summer and will be desperate to strengthen the squad with investment in the upcoming transfer window. Their recruitment, mixed with a strong pre-season, could be essential to the north London side's success.

Here is what Arsenal will be up to in 2024/25 pre-season as things stand.

Where are Arsenal going for 2024/25 pre-season?

We’re delighted to be returning to the United States this summer for our 2024 pre-season tour, where we’ll face off against Liverpool and Manchester United 🔴 — Arsenal (@Arsenal) February 23, 2024

Arsenal are one of the many Premier League giants set for a tour of the United States this summer, with the Gunners heading to North America in late July. At present, they only have two games scheduled but are likely to line more up in the near future - either in the United States or elsewhere.

The Gunners could also book their place in the Community Shield on 6 August for the second year running, but they would need to secure the Premier League title in order to do so. If they were to be crowned champions, they would face either Manchester United or Manchester City in the curtain-raiser at Wembley Stadium.

Arsenal 2024/25 pre-season confirmed schedule

At present, Arsenal have only announced two friendlies on their tour of the United States. The first will see them duel with long-standing rivals Man Utd in California on 27 July, with the two sides having clashed in a friendly last summer that the Red Devils won 2-0.

Four days after their meeting with United, they take on another regular rival in Liverpool . The two clubs have enjoyed some fierce battles during the 2023/24 season at the summit of the Premier League table and will lock horns again in Philadelphia at Lincoln Financial Field.

Arsenal are likely to announce further matches in the coming weeks, while they also have to bear in mind a potential trip to Wembley in the Community Shield.

How to watch Arsenal 2024/25 pre-season

Arsenal are yet to announce how supporters can watch their pre-season encounters, although matches will be available to listen to on the club's official website.

READ THE LATEST ARSENAL NEWS, TRANSFER RUMOURS & GOSSIP

UEFA EURO 2024 fan forum with Gareth Southgate

Written by:

Ahead of Gareth’s arrival, he had taken time out to acknowledge the legacy of former England manager Sir Bobby Robson with a visit to Freeman Hospital.  You can read more on that here. Gareth touched on a variety of topics, including how fortunate he is to have a wide pool of talented players to select his chosen 26-man squad from, whilst also sharing the challenges that come with such a role. He shared his thoughts on the importance of having a like-minded team of staff around the squad and how giving fans a trophy to celebrate is at the forefront of each player and staff member’s ambitions. Our national men’s team manager then went on to answer a range of questions from England Supporters Travel Club  members. Howey also shared his experiences as an England player; what it’s like to be part of an England camp, how it felt being introduced to players that he idolised growing up, and what it was like to share the pitch with Southgate. Steve mentioned it was an absolute privilege to play for the Three Lions. This lead to a touching moment within the evening, whereby Southgate presented Howey with his  Legacy Cap , No 1058.  The evening ended with a signing session with Gareth, who stayed for over an hour to take photos and talk with every supporter who attended. We would like to thank Newcastle United staff for their hospitality, all those involved in the planning of the event, members of the panel and working behind the scenes, and most importantly, the ESTC members who made the time and efforts to attend the event.  We appreciate your support and hope to see you at our Three Lions' summer sendoff fixtures!