UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin showed this week that he doesn’t understand Jurgen Klopp’s point on tickets for Liverpool vs Real Madrid. Ticketing continues to look bad.
Jurgen Klopp made news this week when he decided to take on UEFA’s ticketing choices for the Champions League final. Liverpool will face Real Madrid in the showpiece event, of course – but fans are clearly a secondary concern for the organisation.
Liverpool received a little over 19,000 tickets for the final out of a total 75,000. It means the two clubs get roughly half of the available seating. 12,000 then went on a general sale, while the rest are for the ‘UEFA family’ – i.e people who give them money.
Klopp called that out as ‘not right’ last week.
“It is absolutely not right, but it happens everywhere,” he said, per The Times. “It doesn’t make it better, just in this specific case you are not only paying more than last time for a ticket, but you only get 50 per cent of the tickets and the rest goes to people who pay thousands and thousands for the tickets.”
Now UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin has responded to the Liverpool boss. He’s adamant that ‘it’s not UEFA’ getting these tickets and that Klopp has things wrong.
UEFA President Ceferin responds to Jurgen Klopp
“From the revenues from the finals, Uefa gets 6.5 per cent and 93.5 per cent goes to the clubs,” said Ceferin, again per The Times. “From the other matches, 100 per cent of the revenues goes to the clubs.
“Fans of both teams get 20,000 tickets each. If sponsors that pay 100 or more million euros sponsorship — of which 93.5 per cent goes to the same clubs — get some tickets, it’s part of a contractual obligation that we have.
“Uefa doesn’t get more tickets than the others. Some tickets go to the market, some tickets go to the fans and some go to the partners. It’s not Uefa. I’m not giving tickets for free to my friends or selling to my friends.”
Now, Klopp was making the point that the fans don’t get anywhere near enough tickets. Ceferin seems to believe that the clubs getting a large share of the revenue addresses that point. We’re not sure how.
There will be around 25,000 tickets for this event that go to sponsors and officials. Maybe they’re not UEFA employees or Ceferin’s friends – but that wasn’t Klopp’s point. The point is that these people and companies buy their way into final tickets that fans never have access to.
We’re not entirely sure what UEFA and Ceferin miss with that. Ceferin is right to point out that clubs would be upset to receive less money from sponsors and ticket sales. They’re the ones hit financially if the money went away, after all. But it’s also impossible to believe that these sponsors wouldn’t pay these ‘€100m or more’ amounts unless they got final tickets. That’s not sponsorship – that’s just buying tickets for the final.
The fact that UEFA are more willing to give up those tickets as part of those deals rather than to fans shows the exact problem that Klopp is talking about. And it’s quite bizarre that Ceferin doesn’t see that. He’s not exactly stupid.
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