The seat map is a price list pretending to be a picture

Colour bands on a ticketing map describe what a club thinks it can charge, not what you will actually be able to see.

Open a ticketing site and you get a diagram of the ground with blocks shaded in five colours. It looks like information about viewing quality. It is information about pricing tiers, and the two only loosely agree.

The tell is that the bands are almost always contiguous and symmetrical. Real viewing quality is not. Real viewing quality has ugly local exceptions: the block where a floodlight pylon sits in the eyeline, the row where the tier above cuts off the top of the far goal, the seat next to a stanchion that the map colours identically to the one three places along. Those exceptions are known to the club. They are in the complaints log. They are usually not in the colour scheme, because the colour scheme is a commercial artefact and carving a hole in it costs revenue.

Photo-from-seat features were supposed to fix this, and they half do. The problem is who supplies the photo. A rendered view generated from the bowl geometry is optimistic by construction, because the model contains no people, no roof drainage, no advertising hoarding installed after the model was built, and no rail seating in front of you at head height. A photograph taken on an empty Tuesday is barely better. The honest version is a photograph taken from that seat during a full-capacity match, which almost nobody publishes, for reasons you can work out.

Here is my position. Restricted view should be a disclosed attribute of an individual seat, not of a block, and the disclosure should be as legally meaningful as a floor area is when you buy a flat. If a supporter cannot see one corner flag, that is a fact about the product, and it should sit next to the price rather than in a paragraph of terms.

Some venues do this well. They will tell you plainly that a block has a partial obstruction and discount it, and their resale value is better for it, because supporters trust the map.

The rest are running an old trick with modern software. A map that shows you everything except the thing you would want to know is not a map. It is a menu with the prices in colour.

And you find out where you are actually sitting at about ten to three.