Maine Road 100 – Day 40

It’s day 40 of my posts counting down to the centenary of Maine Road’s opening game and today’s feature concerns ticket prices for the 1998-99 season: The only season MCFC spent in the third tier.

Maine Road was all-seater by this point and the most expensive seat was in the centre blocks B & C at £18 for the highest category game. The cheapest adult seat was £9 for the uncovered temporary stand UU, also known as the Gene Kelly Stand as fans there were used to ‘singing in the rain’ – do an internet search on the reference if you’re baffled or think that Gene Kelly played in the 1937 title winning season. Actually, when I set up the original museum in 2003-04 a Manchester tourist using our ‘Virtual Tour of Maine Road’ interactive asked if Gene Kelly had played international football for Scotland!).

Other temporary stands were erected over the next couple of years as Maine Road struggled to cope with demand. This ticket price plan shows that there isn’t yet an uncovered stand between the Kippax and the Platt Lane for example. It also shows where away fans were housed – this had varied over the years but for most of Maine Road’s last 25 years they had been housed in the Kippax away section of the old stand with some seats in either the Main Stand or in block J (there’s a whole series of possible articles on where the away fans were placed game after game – it did vary and I do remember arriving one day and being surprised at a group segregated in a section of the Main Stand that was normally home fans only).

To help with the flashback to 1998 here’s a newspaper cutting on Ian Bishop’s return in 1997-98:

Of course the 1998-99 season ended with promotion at Wembley – a stadium that had been built by the same builders as Maine Road and in the same year.

If you’d like to read more on the history of Maine Road, take a look at Farewell To Maine Road, which can be downloaded from this page:

Farewell To Maine Road – Part One

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