The fans know how dirty football is ...they get a FINAL reminder every May
VERY rarely a football Suit offers an opinion that chimes perfectly with the gut feeling of their sport’s lifeblood.
Like this from UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin: “Sometimes we forget how dirty this industry is.”
He was responding to questions over Manchester City’s alleged financial doping, but inadvertently summed up how fans of all four teams in UEFA’s showcase finals currently feel. Arsenal are seething about being made to travel to Baku for the Europa League Final, a venue widely viewed as having been chosen as a result of some murky politicking. A dictatorship in all but name, Azerbaijan refuses entry to Armenian nationals, a ruling that makes Henrikh Mkhitaryan fearful for his safety if he plays there, so he refuses to travel. At least he won’t be alone as, thus far, only 3,500 Arsenal fans have bought tickets for the final, due to the fact it’s a 5,000-mile, midweek, roundtrip, costing a minimum £1,000 for flights and £400 a night for a hotel. With Chelsea flogging even fewer, Mkhitaryan would not have been the only one feeling lonely in that 68,700-capacity Baku Olympic Stadium next week. UEFA’s defence is they choose final venues two years in advance so can’t tell which part of Europe fans will be travelling from. Well, the fact only a single Europa League or Champions League finalist in the past decade has come from Eastern Europe offers a clue. And, knowing that, why have UEFA put next season’s Europa League Final in Gdansk, and possibly in Tbilisi in 2021? This year’s Champions League final in Madrid is a more logical choice. Yet, Spurs and Liverpool fans face similar problems of rip-off prices and low ticket and flight availability. Chartered plane prices have jumped 100 per cent from the usual £350 return to £700, due in part to hiked landing costs. Hotels in Madrid have been allowed to so obscenely gazump fans they were looking at bills of £500-£1,000 a night.
Tickets are way more expensive than in 2018, with 80 per cent of them costing between £154-£513.
That’s if fans can get hold of them, with allocations down percentage-wise on last year, as each club receives 16,613.
Meanwhile, 23,500 have gone to “UEFA and national associations, broadcasters, commercial partners and corporate hospitality”.
Thousands of those are now on the black market – some selling for between £5,000 and £35,000 each. It is tout heaven.
Liverpool fans’ group Spirit of Shankly and the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust have targeted the Champions League sponsors, appealing to their consciences (and PR departments) to donate some of their free tickets to genuine fans.
It’s a clever move. Ceferin and pals won’t be too happy in Madrid being told by their paymasters over the sirloin of beef that their brands are being tainted.
But it’s going to take a concerted, pan-European campaign by fans from dozens of big clubs demanding more tickets at lower prices and host cities chosen for accessibility and made to agree limits on hotel prices and landing charges. Which is unlikely to happen any time soon.
And, even if it did, it is unlikely to gain any traction with the Nyon Suits as the needs of fans in distant countries have never bothered them.
They’re far more concerned about the needs of powerful federation bosses, sponsors and dignitaries on the red carpets than powerless individuals who go into debt to travel halfway across a continent in the hope of seeing their team lift silverware.
Or Armenian footballers ruling themselves out of being part of any triumph because they fear for their lives.
As long as enough paying customers turn up to provide the scenery, then it’s back to their five-star troughs and concentrating on the only matters that concern them: their profits and their survival.
Ceferin is right. Sometimes we do forget how dirty this industry is. But, thanks to his Swiss mafia, fans get a brutal reminder of it every May.