What's the chances of getting a home ticket for this? Will they go on general sale, or will it sell out to members first?We are very likely to give you the whole Atyeo stand as we have recently ended the practice of sharing this stand between home and away fans.
For the vast majority of United fans Bristol City will be a new experience for you so you won't be too familiar with how run down our stadium was looking a few years ago. Since then it has had a bit of a revamp with two of the stands being completely rebuilt and although not up to Old Trafford standards, we are all pretty proud of the result which has also seen capacity rise from around 19k to a shade over 27k. The United game will be its first bona fide sell out.
To give a little background info about us, we are owned by a local businessman come good. Stephen Lansdown was one of the founder members of financial services giant Hargreaves Lansdown and having joined the board as a mere multi-millionaire (I believe he was worth under £100m at the time) he has now progressed to the ranks of billionaire. However, whilst he has bankrolled our losses in the past, he is keen to get the club in a position where we can fend for ourselves and as part of this paid for the stadium rebuild so we can finally start to take advantage of the corporate hospitality market.
As we haven't got a recent past in the Premier League, we don't have the benefit of parachute payments so we are unable to compete for the proven players at Championship level against the likes of Aston Villa or the like and have a stated policy of buying young players with resale value. In our first season in the Championship we bought Jonathan Kodjia from Angers in France and sold him a year later for £11-15m to Aston Villa. That fee and sell-on clauses for Albert Adomah and Yannick Bolasie have pretty much paid for our recruitment ever since.
We are quite a young team as a result with a lot of players looking to prove themselves. Given our billionaire backing it does enable us to finally get good value for our better players and we were able to resist Harry Redknapp's attempts to poach Joe Bryan and Aden Flint off us in the Summer whilst bringing in our own record signing, Famara Diedhiou, again from Angers - they appear to be to us what Southampton are to the bin dippers.
Whilst you will rightly be favourites, if you play the same team as faced Swansea we will feel we have a slight chance of progressing, after all, we have as many PL victories as Liverpool this season but we do have six games in hand on them
Anything else you wish to know, just ask and I'll try to answer for you.
My mate wants to go. He's a very casual City fan, hasn't been to a game since he was a kid, and I'm obvs a United fan, so if we can get a ticket, I'd definitely go n'all. I'm not holding out hope though.