Marco, Muniz, and season ticket mystery

Unexciting as a largely uneventful 1-1 home draw to an equally mid-table Crystal Palace may be to some, there are still plenty of Fulham talking points from the weekend.

Marco Silva

I wanted to start the piece commenting further on Marco Silva and his success. Sammy covered it fittingly in his piece last week, but just wanted to cement those comments further by providing some broader context.

Going into next season (hopefully), he will become the fourth longest-serving manager currently in the Premier League, and in the top 10 in England’s top four divisions. If he leads us into the 2025/26 campaign, he will become the longest serving Fulham manager since Alec Stock, a staggering 50 years ago. Stock’s tenure was defined by reaching the FA Cup Final, and as the opening line of El Viva el Fulham goes “Down the Fulham Road we’re burning with ambition”. I get the sense – and I could be wrong – that the Fulham fanbase are largely content with at least one more year of stabilising in the Premier League. But we all know the person that burns with the most ambition down the Fulham Road and that is Marco himself. And that’s the life of a football manager; if you’re successful you can move from club-to-club, we cannot. When it does happen, hopefully it will be good on terms.

Muniz v Mitro

Can we now discuss Muniz and Mitrovic in the same breath? This question was raised by a brother of mine at the Fulhamish live show over the weekend. He wasn’t a plant, I promise! Muniz has now scored nine goals in 16 starts in the Premier League, and potentially on target to better any Mitro’s season in the Premier League for non-penalty goals (10). The Brazilian has showed plenty of personal ambition and has played himself into contention for player of the season.

He’s also played his way into a direct comparison with Mitrovic (in the Premier League, anyway). I am not planting my flag anywhere yet; it’s barely been three months since his first top-flight strike at Burnley. Muniz’s performances have not dropped since, which shows a level of maturity and consistency beyond his years and experience. If he keeps this up it hopefully will not be long before we seriously start having that discussion.

Season tickets: unanswered questions

Given that over the past two seasons prices had shot up by 33% (thanks to our “ambition to become sustainable”, apparently), there was massive anxiety across the fanbase as we headed to towards the end of this campaign as it concerned season tickets. How were the club going to unnecessarily test our loyalty this year? But Friday the announcement came, 4% rise for adult renewals in the ‘horseshoe’, prices frozen for all concessions. I am going to write a longer article about what this means and why there is a sense of relief, but also why no praise should be directed at the senior management. However, there are some unanswered questions, notably:

• We know that If you bought a new season ticket in H5 in 2023/24 you would have paid 4% increase on £830, instead of the renewal price 4% increase on £650. How will supporters feel about paying £180ish more for the same seat? It could be viewed as a loyalty discount. How many years will newer season ticket holders be satisfied, paying a significantly increased cost for the same thing?
• The club have explicitly stated that there will be an upper limit on numbers of season ticket holders of 15,000. Previously the club stated they had aimed for 17,000 season tickets holders, are they expecting a drop off (or a price out) of 11% or are they going to refuse people to renew? It seems an odd time and place to declare how many season tickets they are capping at. Especially as low 50% of Craven Cottage’s total capacity.
• Why in the Riverside Stand were all prices frozen?
• Then there’s the introduction of digital ticketing. Although a move to more advanced technology is a positive step, how this will work in practice?

Hope the supporters trust will be able get some answers. But we know the club’s hierarchy is geared towards what’s best for business rather than the supporters, so perhaps we can all make our assumptions already.