Clueless UEFA leave us with plenty grounds for complaint
UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin clearly managed to talk Jurgen Klopp round during a text discussion over the price of tickets for the Champions League final in Paris. The Liverpool boss had backed fans complaining about his club’s allocation and prices — a fifth of the tickets for Reds supporters for the meeting with Real Madrid on May 28 are between £410 and £578 — but later admitted he didn’t know enough about how monies raised are split between member clubs.
Fair enough. It’s good to talk. Where Ceferin doesn’t have a leg to stand on, though, is with the selection process UEFA are currently adopting for other European finals. Maybe if he chose to listen to others, we wouldn’t find ourselves stuck with massive matchups involving well-supported clubs being put on in grounds you can barely swing a cat in.
Ceferin made headlines earlier this week by insisting that the scenes of ticketless punters storming Wembley for last year’s Euro 2020 final between England and Italy cannot happen again.
‘When a family goes to see a match of the Euro or of any competition, it’s time for fun, for enjoyment, for watching football,’ said the Slovenian. ‘People should feel safe in and around a football stadium. They should never ever feel danger and they felt danger. With the authorities’ help, this cannot happen again. Never.’
Yet, before you could bellow ‘Vindaloo’ and neck another can of Stella, European football’s governing body had announced the venues for the finals of next season’s club competitions — with the climax to the Europa Conference League being staged in a 20,000-seater ground in Prague.
The Sinobo Stadium looks a perfectly pleasant little place. Staged a Super Cup once. How can anyone look at what is unfolding at the end of this season, though, and suggest that is in any way a suitable selection for one of the showpiece games of the campaign?
Rangers’ face-off with Eintracht Frankfurt in Seville on Wednesday is bad enough. The Ramon SanchezPizjuan holds just over 42,000 people. Both sides got 9,500 tickets each. No matter who was in the final, that was never likely to satisfy demand.
The fact it is two clubs who take massive travelling supports with them just reeks of a nightmare on legs. We all know mums and dads and sons and daughters of a
Rangers persuasion about to make this pilgrimage. Just stopping in the street to talk to them about the outlandish plans that exist to get there, the wildest scramble for seats since the last plane out of Saigon, gives a flavour of the levels of excitement building.
Here’s hoping it can be a really special occasion that everyone enjoys and that the decision to open up La Cartuja Stadium for a big-screen viewing — providing initial, all-too-predictable problems in selling tickets online can be ironed out — makes it so.
Yet, those of us who were in Seville with Celtic in 2003 and Manchester with Rangers five years later have our reservations.
Seville ground to a halt when Martin O’Neill’s side played at La Cartuja, which held over 50,000 at the time. You could hardly travel around the city. The stadium ended up holding way more than official capacity with folk sitting in aisles and guys in Celtic tops filling the Press Box. It was impossible to get a cab back into town after the game. And that was against a Porto team that, from recollection, did not bring a massive amount of followers.
Eintracht’s fanbase filed over 100,000 ticket applications for Wednesday night’s game in Seville themselves. Many of them will travel without tickets and heaven knows how many Rangers will take. 70,000? 80,000?
However many make it to Andalusia, one thing Madchester
2008 showed is that too many folk in too tight a space with too much sun and too much drink can be a problem — particularly when a number of them end up unable to see the game.
Yet, there’s another final coming up involving two big teams that shouldn’t be overlooked. Roma meet Feyenoord in the Europa Conference League on May 25. That’s going ahead in Albania’s National Stadium in Tirana. And that holds 22,000.
This is Feyenoord’s first European final in 20 years. Their official allocation, along with that of their opponents, is somewhere just north of 3,000. There was a row just the other week when UEFA, apparently, put the wrong time on their website for the start of the public sale of the extra 8,500 briefs in the ground. There are already reports of Roma fans being charged £9,000 on the secondary market — just like those of Rangers and Eintracht. ‘Feyenoord is disappointed with the limited number of tickets available for supporters of both finalists for this historic match,’ said the Dutch club in a statement last week as they prepared to dish out the small number of briefs they have. ‘In our view, a great match like AS RomaFeyenoord, the very first final of the Europa Conference League, would have deserved a bigger stage with tens of thousands of spectators from both clubs.’
How did UEFA react? By putting next year’s final on in an even smaller stadium. How is that, in any way, an example of the authorities making these games a safer, more enjoyable experience for all?
Look, you would never be able to find an arena capable of hosting everyone who wants to see Rangers play Eintracht. What is about to unfold in the south of Spain will be a phenomenon, an incredible movement and mobilisation of people. Something that speaks to the place football holds in our lives and our cultures.
These finals can be a once-in-alifetime event. They most definitely are a rite of passage. A comingtogether of tribes. Adventures that will be spoken about down the generations.
Surely someone inside UEFA has the commonsense — and the courage to rise above the politics — to see that and raise it. You can’t stop fans travelling without tickets and you can’t do much about the infrastructure of the locality grinding to a halt, but bigger grounds in bigger cities ease those pressures and, above all else, give more people a shot at seeing perhaps the most important game of their lives.
They will also raise more of that cash Ceferin was talking to Klopp about.
Instead, all we’ve had over the past few days is UEFA telling people without a brief for Seville to cancel their plans, to stay at home, to stay clear of a rapacious black market that they have helped create.
As if. The very suggestion that Rangers fans who have forked out hundreds — possibly even thousands — for the planes, trains and automobiles that will get them close to their heroes will pay the slightest attention to these warnings is risible in the extreme.
Not half as nonsensical, though, as responding to complaints over poor organisation and insufficient ticket numbers from so many clubs involved in these touchstone matches by putting one of next year’s European finals on in a ground with a smaller capacity than Pittodrie.
A period that should be a celebration of the game at its best just ends up, as usual, with the sense that those running football haven’t a clue about its culture. And couldn’t care less about its fans.