It’s a carve up as supporters lose out in ticket farce

THE Europa League final of 2022 wasn’t actually meant to be played in Seville. It was originally intended to be played in Budapest at the Puskas Arena.

That’s a stadium which can house over 67,000 fans and would certainly be a better bet

to host a game between two clubs the size of Rangers and Eintracht Frankfurt.

Seville was meant to host last year’s final. But, when the Covid pandemic started causing havoc with scheduling, UEFA had to rejig things and push everything back by a year.

Listen, it’s actually not uncommon for stadiums in the 40,000-50,000 bracket to host the Europa League final. In fact, it’s become the norm.

The last time the final of this competition was played in front of a crowd in excess of 60,000 was when Parma beat Marseille in the old UEFA Cup in Moscow in 1999.

So let’s not get too hung up on the choice of venue. That’s not the main issue here. The real crux of this is how UEFA have chosen to distribute the tickets.

Year after year, there’s an ever-dwindling number and an ever-dwindling sense of consideration to the fans they proclaim as the lifeblood of the game.

Just a few weeks ago, Eintracht Frankfurt crammed 30,000 of their own fans into the Nou Camp for their Europa League quarter-final against Barcelona.

A quarter-final tie in UEFA’s secondary competition is pretty much an irrelevance to Barcelona fans steeped in Champions League glory, so many of them plainly didn’t fancy it.

Frankfurt were only too happy to take the tickets off their hands — and you can safely say Rangers fans would have done exactly the same thing had the opportunity presented itself.

Which brings us to next week’s Europa League final and UEFA’s decision to allocate each club just 9,500 tickets.

Just a few years ago, as they journeyed through the lower leagues, Rangers used to take the guts of 9,500 fans to Somerset Park, never mind Seville.

But that’s their allocation for next week’s showpiece in the Ramon Sanchez-Pizjuan; a venue which hosts just over 40,000.

So, in terms of a combined allocation, Rangers and Frankfurt fans will pretty much only have half the stadium between them.

What about the other half? Well, UEFA put an extra 13,000 tickets on sale to the general public, but many of those have now found their way on to the black market and are being sold for a king’s ransom.

The other 7,000 or so will be for sponsors and dignitaries. You know, the posh seats. The prawn sandwich brigade.

Just a few days ago, Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp took aim at UEFA after his side were allocated just 20,000 tickets for the upcoming Champions League final against Real Madrid.

With the Stade de France able to host over 75,000, he questioned what was going to happen to the other 35,000 briefs beyond those allocated to both clubs.

‘It’s about money,’ said Klopp. ‘UEFA are not the saints of football. They never were.’

You won’t find many Rangers fans who disagree with that assessment. Some of them might feel like they’ve more chance of winning the EuroMillions than getting a ticket for Seville.

In fact, they might need a lottery win to be able to afford one.