Aston Villa Membership: Is It Actually Worth It For Ticket Access?

Aston Villa Membership – Is it Worth it for Tickets?

Last month Aston Villa announced three new initiatives to help members get to games this season. With the North Stand closed for the entire 2026-27 rebuild, working capacity drops to 37,000, and the club’s own figure for average match-by-match availability this season is just 3,600 tickets a game. “An unavoidable consequence of the redevelopment works,” as the club put it.

It’s no secret that not everyone who wants a ticket into Villa Park can get one, so the club has created three separate lotteries to try and manage that shortage instead of one. The club has already been explicit that it expects “all tickets to be sold in the members exclusive window”, meaning there are unlikely to be any general sale opportunities.

That is the leverage membership is being sold against: not a perk you weigh up, but essentially the only way into Villa Park next season. For the match-going non-season ticket holder, that is the context “is membership worth it” now has to sit inside, not whether a pen, cup, or keyring is included in a membership pack.

So what does £59.95 (includes £9.95 postage) actually buy you this season, now the club has announced how it will distribute tickets for members?

What Membership Actually Is

Adult membership at £50 (not including postage) gets you priority access to match-by-match tickets, a VillaTV subscription, gift, and 100 points on the Season Ticket Waiting List, more than a supporter earns from attending every single home league game in a season.

For the club, Membership is a revenue stream that doesn’t depend on anyone actually walking through a turnstile, and a rare window into the habits of the tens of thousands of fans who attend in a more casual manner: how often they come, which fixtures pull them in, what they spend. For supporters, it has always been sold as something closer to belonging than access: a formal tie to the club that once arrived with an actual welcome pack. Rising postage costs and the club’s own sustainability commitments have quietly stripped that back, which leaves ticket access as the main tangible benefit membership should deliver.

Three Ballots Rather Than One Queue

In terms of ticket access this season, the club, working with the Ticketing Working Group of the Villa Fan Advisory Board (FAB), has come up with the following three initiatives.

The First Timer Ballot

This offers up to 250 tickets to members “yet to attend Villa Park for a match in 2026/27”, but only if they’ve been at least once in either of the past two seasons. A supporter who has never set foot in Villa Park in their life does not qualify. This helps reward a minimum baseline of recent loyalty while making sure at least 4,750 (250 x 19 games) members will experience a game next season.

The Match Bundle

This scheme packages two fixtures — a Category 3 and a Category 4 game — into five pre-set bundles, with 1,000 tickets per bundle and one bundle per member. Best case, that’s 5,000 members guaranteed two tickets each, covering ten of the season’s fixtures. So a member picks the bundle they want and buys it on a first-come, first-served basis.

The Loyalty Ballot

This is a limited number of match tickets (unspecified at the time of writing) that are reserved for members sitting above 120 points on the Season Ticket Waiting List, which, under the points system introduced last year, already means people who hold membership and attend regularly. It rewards the fans closest to already having a season ticket (fans at 158 points were offered season tickets over the summer) with another route to one.

Whatever is left after all three schemes goes on sale on a first come, first served basis — 9:30am on a Monday morning, the same scramble that has defined match-by-match sales for years, just for a smaller pool of tickets than ever. 

Champions League Tickets

The Champions League runs slightly differently from the Premier League and offers slight advantages and disadvantages.

Season Ticket Holders obviously get first refusal on their own seat. With some holders maybe put off by the Champions League prices, this could potentially create more availability for members for some games than for Premier League matches. 

The First Timer Ballot allocation of 250 also operates in the Champions League, but then it’s a first come, first served, free for all on the given on-sale time for the rest of them.

Once the knockout rounds arrive, eligibility narrows only to members who have already attended a Champions League match in 2026/27.

So, in short, miss out on a league-phase game and the door closes on the knockout rounds.

The New Ticket Maths

Set 3,600 against a membership base last put at over 50,000 — a figure once quoted in a FAB meeting, that the club hasn’t updated publicly in well over a year, so treat it as a rough guide rather than gospel — and the ballots are dividing up a pool that works out at somewhere in the region of 14 members for every available ticket. 

Three named schemes on top of that ratio doesn’t change it. What’s changed is that the rationing now comes with rules, eligibility criteria and deadlines attached — which reads as supporter-friendly, although it could be argued that it will cause confusion.

For the fan who normally makes the pilgrimage to Villa Park once a season, your chances of getting a ticket will potentially improve, but for the supporter who wants to go to several games, their chances are potentially lower than under the standard system of issuing tickets in a members window.

Membership Improvements

There are some small-scale improvements for members, as they will now be able to list unwanted match tickets for resale through the app, with a full refund triggered if the ticket sells (last year MOMS spearheaded helping get rid of the 20% resale charge supporters were previously hit with).

The extension of the Season Ticket Waiting List points window from two seasons to three is a benefit for the supporters most squeezed this season, ahead of more season tickets being released once full capacity returns in 2027-28.

Will a Membership be Worth It for 2026/27?

The elephant in the room is Villa’s pricing of their membership – like their Champions League prices – is way above most other clubs, if you are simply using the membership to access tickets.

On MOMS time on the FAB, it was often mooted by the club that they would have a two-tier membership set-up, whether they included two levels of ticket priority, or one was a matchday membership with the other one a complete membership with all the bells and whistles, is not known. 

For match tickets, this year for £60 Villa fans are getting entry into a system built on raffles and no guarantees. Also, there’s no membership pack this season, as the small print reads, “we have adapted the annual membership offering from a membership pack to a membership gift as part of our approach to improving sustainability across the club.”

Sustainability Aside

On a side note, several years ago in a fan consultation meeting with club reps, MOMS asked what the club’s sustainability approach and practices were. It seemed that sustainability was a somewhat alien term to the club at the time. While awareness has improved, considering the increase in pre-match stadium displays (which, while improving the matchday presentation, are in reality a sustainability nightmare) suggests the club isn’t too strict on it, so you can see how sustainability can be used in a selective fashion as a public-facing excuse, while costs are lowered to increase profit margins.

There is a simple way around the sustainability issue with memberships, if clubs are serious about it, which some clubs have undertaken, and that’s to offer say a £20 club gift voucher instead of a gift or gift pack. That ticks the box in terms of sustainability and gets the fan into the club shop/online store, where they may spend even more. You also remove the need for a fan paying almost £10 in postage. A win for everyone.

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Best Practice?

There is obviously no silver bullet to the situation of a sharp decrease in ticket availability. The club’s initiatives are at least trying to avoid a blind bun fight, but fans still need to pay in total £60 just to get access to tickets with no guarantees, which is far from ideal.

The logical starting point to address the situation would have been to actually follow through on providing a two-tier membership offering, with one strictly aimed at matchday ticket access. Many Premier League clubs with high ticket demand provide such a membership – Liverpool (£26.99), Manchester United (£37.50), Arsenal (£38.00), Everton (£35.00), Newcastle (£39.00) and Manchester City (£38), for example.

With minimal upfront cost to the club, straight away it gets rid of the controversial £9.95 postage fee and shaves a considerable percentage off the price for fans – in the case of Liverpool, it’s less than half the price of what a Villa fan has to pay just to access tickets. Oh, and it’s more sustainable.

While a more reasonably priced, match ticket-focused membership tier would have been more palatable to supporters, as it stands, membership at the current price is a necessary evil – one that only pays off if you’re disciplined and organised when it comes to members ticket allocation windows and ballots.

What do you think of the Membership set-up and access to tickets? Let us know in the comments below or on FB & X

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