APOEL chairman Phivos Erotokritou yesterday admitted that “mistakes were made” in the way the tickets were sold for the team’s Champions League match against Real Madrid next Tuesday.
He apologised to the thousands of fans who waited for hours to secure a ticket at the GSP Stadium on Thursday, only to leave empty handed. The number that went on sale was much lower than anticipated. Over 3,000 waiting fans were told that only a few hundred tickets were left.
“It is truly shameful what happened (on Thursday), with the hassle we imposed on so many thousands of people with a wrong decision we made,” said Erotokritou. “I won’t try to justify the unjustifiable. We have responsibility, we didn’t handle this matter with the tickets the way we should have.”
He added: “I truly apologise and say sorry to everyone”.
Erotokritou said there were around 19,000 tickets initially available. “There were pre-sales online and all those with season tickets got some, and we had decided that the tickets that were left would be made available to the rest of the fans the following day,” he said.
Erotokritou fended off criticism that it had been a wrong move to sell the tickets online. “It wasn’t wrong. The mistake there, and I admit it, is that we didn’t restrict the number of tickets that someone could buy,” he said. “There are people who, instead of buying one or two, they bought four, five, 10, 20 or more.”
Asked to comment on whether a number of the tickets would end up on the black market – a quick look online proves there are dozens of websites offering the much-desired tickets for as much as €779 each – Erotokritou was dismissive.
“Even if someone didn’t plan to put them on the black market, if they are offered large sums for the ticket, especially now with the economic crisis, they will sell it,” he reasoned.
But he added: “This isn’t the issue. The issue is that when we saw there were only 500 tickets available the previous night, we shouldn’t have opened the tills. We should have said the tickets had sold out and found other ways to give the tickets out”.
Fans started arriving at GSP in the small hours of Thursday morning, while some even spent the night in their cars waiting for the tills to open.
Thousands of fans waited patiently outside the stadium until an announcement was made at around 11.30 informing them there was a limited amount of tickets.
By 12.30, the fans were enraged when they were told there were only a few hundred tickets left and the vast majority of them left empty handed.
“People started calling me from 6am,” said Erotokritou. “But we didn’t manage to make an announcement on time.”
