The rush was too great for UEFA’s systems. When the organizing association released the last 100,000 tickets for general sale around six weeks before the start of the European Football Championship, nothing worked at first. Error messages and problems with identification meant that fans were unable to get into the queue for minutes.
Later, around 500,000 fans had to wait at the same time. Many went away empty-handed. In the previous rounds, demand had already significantly exceeded supply. The fan response was huge. 2.7 million stadium visitors are expected – a new European Championship record.
The tickets have largely been sold out. The participating nations will only be given tickets for the knockout round. There will be 6,000 tickets per association for the round of 16 and quarter-finals, 7,000 for the semi-finals and 10,000 for the final. These are tiny contingents compared to the tickets sold so far.
The hope of getting a ticket now is therefore vanishingly small. At least not officially. On the Internet, however, there are still numerous offers: on ticket marketplaces such as Viagogo, sales platforms such as classified ads or on social media.
“A major sporting event like the European Championship in your own country really appeals to consumers. The appeal of taking part in this experience is great,” says Iwona Husemann from the North Rhine-Westphalia Consumer Advice Center.
This is exactly where the providers on the black market come in. They lure people with the dream of a last-minute ticket – and in return demand absurd prices. On Viagogo, which appears at the top of a Google search for European Championship tickets, a Category 3 final ticket costs a cheeky 1,950 euros.
Officially, UEFA would charge 300 euros for this. “We are often talking about offers on the black market that are four to six times the original price,” says Husemann.
She advises against accepting such offers for another reason. Just before the start of the tournament, UEFA had officially warned that “tickets purchased by unauthorized third parties” could be “invalidated by UEFA at any time”. This had already happened to several hundred tickets in the run-up to the European Championship.
In the worst case scenario, fans would “end up standing at the stadium with a blocked ticket and not being able to get in,” says Husemann. Anyone who buys tickets on the black market can still try to make a claim for damages against the seller if something goes wrong with the ticket. But success is not guaranteed. On secondary market exchanges, “it is incredibly difficult to find out who sold you the ticket,” says Husemann.
Viagogo is a special case, as Philipp Schröder-Ringe, an expert in event law at the Berlin law firm Härting, explains. The platform does not even specify the seller, and in case of doubt you are usually dealing with Viagogo itself.
“The company is based in Switzerland, and that makes it pointless. Consumers can sue Viagogo in Germany, but a judgment must then be enforced in Switzerland.” At least you don’t make yourself legally vulnerable by making a purchase, says Schröder-Ringe: “It is not forbidden to buy tickets on Viagogo.”