Liverpool Fans Will Get Refunds for Champions League Final Tickets

UEFA officials, and French sports officials, have offered previous apologies to Liverpool and its fans for the overcrowding after initially shifting blame for the problems on “late-arriving” fans. (It also first said people who arrived with fake tickets were to blame, though those claimed were later debunked by a check of computer ticketing records.) Liverpool and its fans have taken great offense to those comments; at a recent Champions League game against Real Madrid, the teams’ first meeting on the field since last year’s final, Liverpool fans raised banners critical of UEFA and denouncing France’s sports minister and interior minister as liars.

The UEFA statement announcing the ticket refunds, a tangible and multimillion-dollar effort perhaps aimed at defusing some of those hard feelings, was notable in that it included neither a new apology or any comment from the organization’s president, Aleksander Ceferin. Instead, one of Ceferin’s top deputes thanked Liverpool fans for their input and said the refund plan was an effort “to recognize the negative experiences of those supporters on the day.”

UEFA said refunds would be made available to all fans with tickets for six specific gates of the Stade de France, but also to all fans whom ticketing controls showed did not enter the stadium before the scheduled 9 p.m. kickoff, and to any others who were not able to — or chose not to — enter the stadium at all.

That refunded tickets, UEFA said, included Liverpool’s entire allotment of 19,618, but potentially hundreds, or even thousands, of others held by fans affected by the problems at the match.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/sports/soccer/liverpool-tickets-champions-league-final.html