Loyalty points turned support into a queue number

Attendance-based membership schemes were built to reward regulars, and ended up rationing access by accumulated spend.

Every club with more demand than seats has to ration somehow, and points systems look like the fair way to do it. You went to the away game in November in the rain, you get first refusal on the semi-final. Hard to argue with. I have argued for it myself.

The trouble arrives about five years in, when the ladder gets tall.

A points scheme is a compounding advantage. Whoever is at the top of the table this year gets access to the scarce matches, and attending those scarce matches earns more points, which puts them further up next year. The ordering stops being a record of commitment and becomes a record of who started early and never had a period of their life where they could not afford to go. Move city for a job at twenty-three, come back at thirty, and you are behind people who have never had to make a choice about it.

Then there is the part that turns supporters against each other. Because points are usually earned by purchase rather than presence, buying a ticket you do not use scores the same as standing in the ground. That is a rational thing to do if you want the cup final, so people do it, and the club ends up with paid-for empty seats at exactly the fixtures it wanted to fill.

The fixes are known and mostly ignored. Scan the ticket, not the receipt, so points follow attendance. Cap the top of the ladder so it plateaus. Hold back a genuine ballot allocation for people with no history at all, because a support base that only renews itself internally will age out. Some clubs do one of these. Very few do all three.

What bothers me most is what the scheme does to how people talk. Supporters now introduce themselves by tier. There is a whole vocabulary of entitlement built on a database field, and it is used to adjudicate who is allowed to complain about the team, which is not a thing any club set out to build.

A membership programme is a rationing tool. That is fine. But a rationing tool designed once and never adjusted stops distributing scarcity and starts distributing status, and by then the people it disadvantages have already stopped applying.