Outrage: 13-year Villa season ticket holder ejected and banned and Holte End walk-out protest

Holte End ejections, fans banned from buying tickets and a walk-out protest.

Aston Villa, the only Premier League club to publicly back safe standing, in the first two home games of the season has taken a worryingly heavy-handed approach of ejecting Villa supporters in L8 of the Holte End for simply doing something that the club wishes to return to the Holte – standing. MOMS was in L7 of the Holte End for the Liverpool game and saw stewards and then the police enter the section of the Holte to remove young Villans who were doing nothing more than supporting their team.

These supporters are not trouble makers or hooligans, they were just doing what most supporters do home and away during a game. Cast your mind back to the League Cup semi-final against Bradford City last season and not one bum touched a seat in the Holte End during the 90 minutes of the second leg. Why wasn’t the entire stand ejected for such behavior? I know personally, in recent years, I’ve spent at least 75% of my time at Villa Park, standing, whether it be in the Holte End or lower North stand. Maybe I’m not welcome by the club any more?

We will go into the full implications of the standing situation at a later date, now we just want to bring your attention to what happened at the Rotherham League Cup game, when supporters were ejected from the game, including a 13-year Villa season ticket holder who also has been blocked from buying further tickets to games. It’s nothing short of an outrage.

In MOMS’s various dealings with the club over the last couple of years, there has been an incredulous lack of empathy for what a football supporter is. If the club want to consider Villa fans simply as ‘consumers’, then legally with the literal duty of care that comes with that, they’re opening up a can of worms.

Standing in all-seater stadiums is a grey area, but it is not illegal and shouldn’t be tackled with such zero tolerance sanctions. What was the club’s marketing hashtag again? #Cometogether?