UEFA has been criticised by the Football Supporters Europe (FSE) association after ticket allocations for the 2024 men’s Champions League and Europa League finals were confirmed on Tuesday.
It was announced that this year’s Champions League final, which will take place at Wembley on June 1, will see each team involved allocated 25,000 tickets of the 86,000 that are available in total. The remaining tickets will be offered for general sale to fans worldwide.
This season’s Europa League final, which will be held at the Dublin Arena in the Republic of Ireland on May 22, will see the two clubs that progress to that stage allocated 12,000 tickets each out of the 48,000 that are available.
The FSE has taken issue with the allocation to supporters of the participating clubs, calling on UEFA to increase the amount of tickets available.
A statement from the FSE read: “The FSE calls on UEFA and the local organisers to do right by the supporters and increase these allocations.
“Some encouraging progress has been made in recent seasons following repeated calls to do so by FSE.
“The 2023-24 UEFA Champions League Final at Wembley will see the largest finalists’ allocation for the competition in a decade (58 per cent), while for the Europa Conference League Final in Athens, 66 per cent of tickets will go to the finalist clubs’ supporters, which is an all-time high for any UEFA club competition final.
“Despite this, a consistent approach across all finals is still needed. A paltry 50 per cent of capacity for Europa League finalist clubs is, simply, not good enough and falls well short of FSE’s demand to provide at least 66 per cent of tickets for all European finals to supporters of the teams involved.
“Fans of competing teams need to be given clear priority over public sale options.”
When approached for comment on the FSE statement, UEFA told The Athletic: “After extensive discussions with the local authorities regarding operational and logistical operations as well as the designated access routes to the ends of the stadium occupied by supporters of each of the finalists, it has been decided that the two clubs that reach the final can receive a maximum of 12,000 tickets each.”
Dublin’s Aviva Stadium is hosting this year’s men’s Champions League final (Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)
Jurgen Klopp questioned UEFA’s distribution of tickets for the Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid in Paris in 2022, but UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin defended the ticket allocation claiming that “the system works.”
“I explained the same thing (why there are fewer tickets for supporters) to one of the coaches from one of the two teams a couple of days ago. I explained it to him and went through everything,” said Ceferin.
“First of all, UEFA, from the revenues from the final, gets 6.5 per cent and 93.5 per cent goes to the clubs. From the other matches, 100 per cent of the revenue goes to the clubs.
“Fans of both teams gets 20,000 tickets each. If sponsors that pay €100 million or more for sponsorships, of which 93.5 per cent goes to the same clubs, get some tickets because of a contractual obligation that we have.
“UEFA does not get more tickets than the others. Some tickets go to the market, some go to the fans and some go to the partners. It is not UEFA. I am not giving tickets for free or selling them to my friends.
“The system works and clubs could not function differently. For us, not much would change if the tickets were €10, but a lot would change for the clubs.”
GO DEEPER
Ceferin explained Champions League ticket allocations to final manager
(Fabrice COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)