Hearts’ official website has confirmed that the club will indeed be hosting a pre-season friendly against Barcelona in July.
A date of Saturday 28th July has been agreed for the fixture, which will take place at Murrayfield. This will be the first time that the Catalans have played in Edinburgh and although the fact that it’s only a friendly match, it’s bound to be a fixture that captures the imagination of the public. I’ve already spoken to several non-Hearts supporters about the possibility of this happening and they all said they’d be interested in going, so we could well be looking at a bumper crowd for the match.
However there are two factors that may prevent people from coming: which players Barca bring with them and the price of admission. If there are at least a couple of their established stars guaranteed to take some sort of part in the game, then that will probably be enough to encourage a big crowd, especially if the price is reasonable. When I say reasonable, I mean that the club have to take into account the fact that it is a friendly match, regardless of the opposition. Therefore they should be charging no more than they would for a standard SPL match. Any more and people will tell them to stick it.
Exciting fixture to look forward to though. Around 20,000 went to the Osasuna game last year, so I think you’d have to be looking at significantly more than that for Barcelona.
Share this article
Related Articles
£30 for the good section, ranging down to £20 for the “cheap” seats. Me smells a rip off.
£18 for the cheap seats actually. 😉 Same pricing as a Category A home game. Nevertheless, despite the high price, I do think that given the club have started aggressively marketing this match as soon as it was agreed, coupled with the fact that the game doesn’t take place until the end of July, means that we should be looking at the biggest attendance for a Hearts “home” game since the 1950s. I’m certainly going – and I don’t expect to have to shout to the person next to me except to be heard above the noise!
What would our biggest gate since the ’50s be then? 50,000?
Around that, yes. You can check the stats on londonhearts.com. Up until the 50s, we regularly used to have crowds of ~50,000 against the big teams.