The UEFA Champions League is arguably the biggest club level football competition in the world, where millions of people show their support by coming to these matches. Only last year the attendance for the match between Bayern Munich and Inter Milan at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium was recorded to be 73,170 and the year previous to that when Barcelona won their treble by beating Manchester United at Estadio Olimpico in Rome, 62,467 football supporters registered their attendance. The highest registered attendance in a UEFA Champions League final match has been of 1, 35,000 fans which is in itself a colossal figure.
Seeing these rising figures of attendance, The European Football Association, UEFA, thought of becoming a money minting machine and hiked the ticket prices for this year’s finale at the Wembley Stadium, London on May 28th 2011. The association has been blamed for the overpricing of tickets and leaving fans furious over the prices which begin at £176 for general sale including the booking fee. UEFA announced that it will keep 11,000 tickets for general public at a price of £150 plus a £26 ‘administration fee’. Also, 50,000 seats are reserved for fans of both the finalist teams that will play the match but these tickets are priced at only £80 each. These tickets are categorized under “Category 4”.
The general tickets will have various prices costing £150, £225 and £300 plus the additional ‘administration fee’ which is just like the extra icing on the cake of expensive ticket prices. If we compare these ticket prices to those at Rome in 2009, we can clearly see that the prices have almost doubled since then. The rise every year in the Champions League finale tickets since Manchester United played Barcelona is about 15%. Even the World Cup tickets in South Africa were priced at around £100 each which shows the extraordinary charging by UEFA at Wembley. The UEFA director of competitions Giorgio Marchetti said, “This is the market price. Do you think we would have trouble filling Wembley if the prices were higher? Do you think it would be different? We try to strike a balance between the interest of supporters and the interest of the event. Why should we price the tickets lower than what we think is a fair level?” But the Football Supporters Federation Chairman Malcolm Clarke had something else to say. He thrashed the idea of such humongous ticket price by saying, “These prices are absolutely outrageous and take ticket pricing to an absurdly stratospheric new level.” He empathized with the situation of the supporters by adding, “In a difficult economic climate, not only in this country but across Europe, where supporters may be coming from, this represents disgraceful exploitation of fans.”
Last year UEFA earned a reported £11m at Madrid during the final between Bayern Munich and Internazionale and this year they are expecting to make £14m at Wembley. So, whichever team wins hardly matters to UEFA because it is going to make a fortune. If you wish to show your support, get ready to shell out a couple of hundred pounds.
Also published here
Also published here
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