City are drawing up a priority plan for the general sale of Wembley tickets after confirming they had secured 1,200 more seats.

The club have sold close to 29,000 tickets so far for the Capital One Cup final against Swansea on February 24. They were given an initial allocation of 31,852 before the request for extras was approved.

Sales are restricted to season-ticket and flexicard holders only until the close of business on Wednesday. The remainder are due to go on general sale the next morning – but with a preferential system in place.

Director of operations David Baldwin is finalising the format, which will be revealed after the weekend home game against Gillingham.

Baldwin said: “We have got another small allocation and I will be making an announcement either Saturday evening or on Sunday about the process for general sales.

“We are ascertaining how many will be available for general sale from February 13 and what conditions will be applied to that purchase.

“Clearly the demand for these tickets is huge, so I’ve got to put a system in place that creates a fair prioritisation. There will be some trigger put in place.

“People will know by Sunday exactly what the position is going to be for next week.”

Baldwin admits City could have sold their total of tickets twice over as fans from all over the world clamour to get to the club’s first cup final for 102 years.

He said: “I’m not surprised at all. What did surprise me was the volume that we did in the first couple of days.

“We’ve transacted hundreds each day since last Thursday but we literally did 21,000 on the first day and another 6,000 on the second.

“It’s been a huge task. But although there were massive delays because of the volume of traffic, the system held up and we’ve been fully operational at all times.

“There are people who’ve made errors on the system – their own errors. They want us to rectify them and we’ve got to work through those step by step.

“Some people are pressing us for immediate answers but that takes time. When you are dealing with this many people, even 100 errors can take a long time to fix.

“I’d just ask for people to have patience and take some personal responsibility.”

Meanwhile, City are waiting for the swelling on Rory McArdle’s injured ankle to go down before they can assess the severity of the problem. They hope to have the injury scanned either today or tomorrow.

Fans travelling to Wycombe on Tuesday are reminded that tickets from the original game are still valid.

City are running supporter coaches at £20 per head and seats must be booked by 5pm tomorrow. Fans who have the travel receipt from the postponed December trip will get a £10 credit but they must secure their place before the deadline.