With tickets to Arsenal’s home matches harder to get than ever, this FAQ will not only answer questions about the Arsenal Philadelphia ticketing process, but also about the alternative ways to get tickets that are safe and legal if you are not eligible to request tickets from us or if your request is not approved, and, just as importantly, where NOT to buy tickets and how to avoid being scammed in your search.
If you have any questions left unanswered after reading this FAQ, please reach out to ticketing@arsphl.com.
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.
You can request tickets from us if you are a current dues-paying member of Arsenal Philadelphia who joined or renewed by the close of enrollment for the current season. If you are unsure of your membership status you can check in the Member Area of your User Account page.
As is explained elsewhere in this FAQ, our allocation of tickets is intended to serve Arsenal supporters who live within our membership area, meaning you can reasonably attend events at one of our Official Chapter Pubs, which are within 50 miles “as the crow flies” from Philadelphia County.
As a member, you can request up to four tickets in one transaction. You must provide the names and email addresses of every person in your group, including children of any age (even infants need a ticket and a unique email address). Each email address you provide must be associated with an Official Supporters Club membership. Typically this will be an Arsenal Philadelphia membership, but we know our members often travel to London with their Gooner friends from other places around the US and the globe. A dues-paying Arsenal Philadelphia member must make the request, but if a person in your group is not from our area, we will still allow you to get a ticket for them so you can sit together so long as they provide proof of membership in the Official Supporters Club that serves their area. We just ask that if most of your group is from elsewhere, you request tickets through their club rather than ours, and that you do not request tickets for the same match from multiple clubs. Be warned: We do communicate with the ticketing officers at our fellow Supporters Clubs. If you request from us and they request from their own Supporters Club in an attempt to increase your chances WE WILL FIND OUT and WE WILL CANCEL BOTH REQUESTS IMMEDIATELY.
Any requests found to be from “ticket-hunters” joining from outside our geographic membership area or if your group has people who are not members of any Official Supporters Club, your request will be discarded and deposits refunded.
Ticket requests are only accepted via the ticket request page on arsphl.com. The page will only allow requests to be made by dues-paying members of Arsenal Philadelphia. The form will allow you to request up to four tickets, but all of the people in your group must be dues-paying members. A deposit for the expected face value of the tickets is required to process the request.
Tickets requested via email, social media comment or direct message, text message, or any other method will be discarded and not processed.
Arsenal Philadelphia uses a points system to determine how to award our limited allocation of tickets. Points are earned in several ways:
- Longevity of uninterrupted membership
- How early you join or renew
- Match attendance at Official Chapter Pubs
When a member is awarded tickets to a match, their longevity and early sign-up/renewal points remain, but their attendance points are reset so others will have a better chance at tickets for subsequent matches.
A detailed breakdown of your points balance is viewable in the Membership tab of your Account Page.
We want to be clear: Arsenal Philadelphia is an Official Supporters’ club NOT a ticket agent. If you are intending to join Arsenal Philadelphia only for the chance to request tickets to an upcoming match and not for the many other benefits of membership, due to the points system you are very unlikely to have your request approved, and may not feel you got value for your dues. If you are only joining Arsenal Philadelphia for tickets, we would recommend not joining and exploring one of the alternative options for tickets discussed in the next question on this FAQ.
If your request is denied, you miss the request deadline for your desired match, or you are deemed ineligible to request tickets from Arsenal Philadelphia, all is not lost! Here are the other safe and legal sources for tickets:
If you or most people in your group are not from within our geographic membership area, you may be able to request tickets from one of the other Official Supporters Clubs in the US.
Arsenal America and Arsenal NYC are fantastic organizations and great friends of ours. If you are in New York City Arsenal NYC is certainly your club, and like ours their membership area reaches into the greater metropolitan area. If you live near New York City, check arsenal.nyc to see if you are within range of one of their branches. If you’re anywhere else in the US you can join Arsenal America at arsenalamerica.com.
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.
Because of high demand and as an anti-touting measure (known as scalping here in the US), Arsenal now sells tickets via a lottery which they call a ballot.
In order to be eligible for the ballot you must purchase a Red membership from Arsenal FC (this is totally separate and different from membership in Arsenal Philadelphia) well in advance of the match. While there are no hard and fast deadlines, recently purchased memberships may be ineligible for a ballot.
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.
If you entered a ballot and were unsuccessful, you will be eligible to access the Arsenal Ticket Exchange where ticket holders can sell any tickets they don’t plan to use. Only Arsenal Members who entered the ballot and were unsuccessful have access to the TX, the tickets are sold at face value and the Emirates Box Office facilitates the transfer so you know your tickets are guaranteed.
Because there are so many people looking for tickets on the TX, when tickets are listed they typically sell within seconds. Getting tickets on the TX 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.
Arsenal offers hospitality packages directly through their website at hospitality.arsenal.com. Hospitality packages can be purchased by anyone regardless of membership status. Hospitality packages include your choice of a number of available VIP experiences, from a more basic (relatively speaking) Club Level ticket with minimal free food and drink to VIP Executive Boxes featuring unlimited refreshments, personalized Matchday Programmes, authentic kits and other memorabilia, and even visits from Arsenal legends and current players. Prices vary based on what package you choose, but the lower priced packages start at about $600 per person with a minimum of two people, and go up to many thousands per person.
OATs are basically travel agents who specialize in “VIP” football experiences and are authorized by Arsenal to provide tickets to the match as part of their packages. These agents are trustworthy, but they are usually expensive. Because the tickets are only sold as part of a package, price per person starts around $600 and can go up to well over $1500. But you can be assured that if you purchase from an OAT on Arsenal’s list you will absolutely get valid tickets. A number of Arsenal Philadelphia members who had groups larger than four people or just wanted a unique experience have used OATs and given very positive feedback.
…and that’s it! There are literally no other authorized, legal ways to get tickets for an Arsenal match. If you hear of another source and want to check its legitimacy, use Arsenal’s Online Agent Website Checker. Just enter the website of the source into the checker (don’t forget to put “https://” before the domain name). If the source’s website doesn’t show up as authorized, we recommend you avoid dealing with them.
For most Premier League matches the deadline to request tickets is 60 to 70 days 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 FC and they do not make exceptions.
You can make your request up to the deadline but if you are on equal points with another requestor, the tie-break is who requested first. So we strongly recommend requesting as early as possible.
If you miss the deadline: If you miss the deadline you’ll need to look for tickets elsewhere. The alternative ways of getting tickets are listed above, but to give a short summary of your options: If it’s more than four to six weeks before matchday, you may still be able to enter the Red member ballot, and if you can get in the ballot but don’t win you can then try the Ticket Exchange. If you missed the ballot your only remaining options are packages from Arsenal Hospitality or an authorized Overseas Agent Ticketseller (OAT).
That said, we want to set realistic expectations: packages from Arsenal Hospitality and authorized OATs are almost always sold out well before the match, and in the unlikely event they have anything left it will probably be the most expensive packages which cost many thousands of dollars per person. Bottom line, getting Arsenal tickets is difficult in the best of circumstances; getting Arsenal tickets on short notice is next to impossible.
Let us be totally clear: it is 100% ILLEGAL in the UK 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. While StubHub and similar sites are commonly used for all of our sporting events here in the US, in the UK football is considered cultural heritage and there are laws to ensure that football stays accessible and affordable to as many people as possible.
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 who legally acquired them. Violations can result in the original purchaser having their Arsenal membership canceled 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 seats, hence many of the tickets you see on these sites are fakes. Even if they are real, Arsenal routinely monitors ticket resale sites and deactivates the tickets listed on them. 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 and deactivated tickets. And with Arsenal’s recent switch to 100% digital ticketing with dynamic QR codes, the number of people denied access 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 denied entry when they get 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 $70 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 charges us for the tickets, plus 6.5% to cover domestic and foreign transaction fees.
We start sending out approval emails about 6 weeks before the match. We emphasize the word “start” because members have 3 days to accept and pay for tickets. If an approved member does not pay in that 3-day window, we move to the next member in queue who then has 3 days to accept and pay, and so on until all tickets in our allocation for that match are accepted and paid for. So your approval may arrive closer to 5 weeks or even 4, depending on how many people requested the same match as you and where you are in the queue.
Both Arsenal FC and Arsenal Philadelphia understand the importance of giving you time to make travel arrangements and/or find an alternative source for tickets if your request is denied. We will make every effort to give you as much notice as possible.
If your request is denied, and you chose to be added to the waiting list during the request process, you will receive an email if tickets become available. If tickets free up, it’s often within days or even hours of the match that someone has an emergency cancellation. If you are on the waiting list, make sure your phone has solid internet access and you can receive emails in London so you don’t miss an opportunity for tickets.
Tickets will be emailed to you according to the following process:
If your request is approved, you will receive a payment link via email. If you do not pay within 48 hours you will receive ONE reminder email. If you do not pay within 24 hours of the reminder (72 hours total), the tickets will be offered to the next member in queue.
You will have until 30 days before the match to provide proof of travel arrangements showing that you will not arrive or depart from London within two days of the match, and a valid passport. This is to ensure:
- you can attend the match even if it is moved by a day or two for TV scheduling purposes (which happens frequently)
- you are not arriving in London so close to the match that a minor travel delay could prevent you making it to the match
- to ensure the requestor is who they say they are and is personally going to London and attending the match, not attempting to get tickets for resale or for a third party.
Tickets emailed to the member who made the request. We do not separate the tickets and issue them to individuals in your group; we take their email addresses during the request process only to verify their membership status.
The emails have PDFs attached that can be printed, as well as 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 printout 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 your ticket request was approved and you’ve paid and submitted your travel documents, you are 100% guaranteed to get tickets and they will be emailed to you before the match.
Please plan ahead and make sure you will have access to your email on your smartphone in the UK. Check with your mobile provider to ensure you will have mobile internet, and if not, know where you will have access to wi-fi on the day before and day of the match.
We have no way of knowing the seat location 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 Clock End, somewhere in blocks 119-125. We have occasionally gotten tickets in the lower tier of the Clock End as well, but not often. Again, there are no guarantees that we will continue to be seated there; the box office has total discretion over that. 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 ticketing@arsphl.com if you find at any point in the process that you will no longer be able to attend the match. If tickets have not yet been allocated we will simply cancel your request. If your ticket request has already been approved, we will help you transfer your ticket(s) to another member. If you have already paid, we will refund you as soon as the tickets are accepted by another member. You remain financially obligated for the tickets until another member accepts them.
If you have already received the tickets via email, keep in mind that tickets are and remain the property of Arsenal Philadelphia for use exclusively by our members, and it is ILLEGAL under UK law to resell football tickets, even at face value or less. You MUST contact us so we can enlist the help of the box office in transferring the tickets to another member.
While it is our official policy that ticket requests can not be cancelled after they have been submitted, we do not want the tickets to go to waste and demand is high enough that we can almost always find someone to take tickets if you can’t use them, even with short notice. So again, please contact us immediately if your plans change so we can get them to another member.
Matches may be rescheduled by up to three days with relatively little notice. Match rescheduling by a up to a few days is not grounds for a refund. In 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 one day, and two or three is better if possible (we’ve recently seen a match move from a Saturday to the following Tuesday).
Arriving in London the day before or after the match (or the day of the match) a match 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 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, 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 ILLEGAL in the UK to resell football tickets even at or less than face value. 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 are not allocated tickets for away matches, so we cannot take requests or provide tickets for them.
The extremely limited supply of away tickets is allocated to Gold and Platinum Season Ticket Holders and the loyal members of Arsenal’s Travel Club (this is a separate program within Arsenal FC, not a Supporters Club). These supporters have no points when they first gain Gold status (which takes decades in itself) or join the Travel Club (which is currently closed to new members due to demand), so they can only go to matches that require zero points to attend (less desirable fixtures like early-round domestic cup ties on cold winter weekday evenings at obscure grounds in the farthest reaches of England). There are usually only two to four matches per season available with zero points, but attending each of those matches earns them points that stay in their accounts for three years. So each season they diligently attend undesirable away fixtures, and over the course of many years they slowly increase their points balance to qualify for tickets to Premier League away matches which typically require 40 or more points. Some of the smaller grounds require 55 points or more, meaning even members who have been building up points for decades sometimes can’t attend.
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.
A NOTE ABOUT BUYING TICKETS IN THE HOME SECTIONS OF AN OPPONENT’S STADIUM: Arsenal Philadelphia STRONGLY discourages purchasing tickets to an away match in a home supporters’ section of any stadium. Every club in the Premier League has a policy that home tickets are for home supporters. If you wear Arsenal apparel (or even Arsenal colors at some stadiums) you will be denied entry. If you get in, any display of support for Arsenal, no matter how slight, will be grounds for immediate ejection. It can also be quite dangerous if you are discovered by home supporters who decide to take the matter of your trespass into their own hands before security or the police can intervene. Please, just don’t do it.
Supporters Clubs do not get an allotment of tickets for Arsenal Women FC matches. Fortunately, now that Arsenal WFC plays most of their matches at the Emirates, tickets are relatively easy to buy at very reasonable prices directly from Arsenal’s website. For the occasional match that is till played at Meadow Park, general admission and standing room tickets for matches at Meadow Park are usually available as well. Tickets for Arsenal WFC matches at either venue can be purchased at arsenal.com.