£54,000 for ONE Euros ticket: Mad scramble to be part of history as England prepare to meet Italy in crunch Wembley final... but experts warn of rip-off websites
Tickets for England’s first major football final since 1966 were being sold by touts for an astonishing £54,000 each yesterday.
The desperation to watch the Three Lions play Italy in the final of Euro 2020 at Wembley on Sunday night has sparked a frantic online bidding war.
Hours after millions celebrated England beating Denmark 2-1 in a tense semi-final, supporters began their desperate hunt for seats for the final.
Tickets for England’s first major football final since 1966 were being sold by touts for an astonishing £54,000 each yesterday
Tickets on Uefa’s official website sold out last week and it is highly doubtful whether any more will appear.
But thousands of lucrative seats have been listed on high-profile ticket resale websites, social media pages and Ebay.
Yesterday the Mail found a pair of tickets for sale on tout website Ticombo for £54,000 each – more than 180 times their original face value of £295. Each ticket was being offered for £43,000, and each came with a whopping booking fee of £11,000.
Elsewhere, hospitality tickets were being sold for £40,000 apiece on a website called Live Football Tickets. Thousands of others are being offered at prices ranging from £5,000 to £30,000. But it is hard to establish whether all are genuine.
Tickets on Uefa’s official website sold out last week and it is highly doubtful whether any more will appear
Uefa has warned that fans who used these websites to buy seats could be refused entry into the ground, while consumer watchdogs said many being sold this way are fakes.
A Twitter account called ‘Wembley Scam Tickets’, which highlight fraudulent sellers, said it had received messages from fans who had paid £32,000 for fake seats.
Some supporters have written scathing online reviews about tout websites, complaining that tickets never arrived and phone calls were ignored. Adam French, a consumer rights expert at Which?, warned that fans could be ‘left thousands of pounds out of pocket’.
He said: ‘England’s win over Denmark has understandably kicked off an almighty scramble. We’re seeing tickets for sale on websites or via secondary sellers for thousands of pounds.
Uefa has warned that fans who used these websites to buy seats could be refused entry into the ground
‘Even though some of these websites claim to offer tickets from 100 per cent trusted sellers, this is often not the case.’
Adam Webb, from campaign group FanFair Alliance, said: ‘Rogue ticket tout websites continue to buy their way to the top of internet search results, misleading buyers, and give highly controversial businesses an undeserving cloak of legitimacy.’
He said most websites were registered outside of the UK, making it difficult for supporters to get refunds if something went wrong.
The crowd at Wembley on Sunday is expected to be 67,500. The Government has resisted pressure to allow the stadium to host a capacity crowd of 90,000.