UEFA revealed on Tuesday that the number of fake tickets for the Champions League final that have already been confirmed amounts to 2,600, a figure much lower than the 35,000 tickets advanced by the French interior minister.
Gérald Darmanin had saved the advanced figure before the Senate in the days after the match between Real Madrid and Liverpool, which the Spanish club won 1-0, but a person in charge of UEFA, organizer of the competition, rejected in hearing that it could have been so high.
“We know about 2,600 counterfeit tickets made it to the turnstiles, but many didn’t make it there. How much? We don’t know and we can’t be sure. But we don’t think it could have reached the advanced figure in France, 30,000 to 40,000,” UEFA events director general Martin Kallen said.
The 2021/22 Champions League final was marred by several security breaches, what motivated opening of an independent investigation by UEFAled by Tiago Brandão Rodrigues, a former Portuguese Minister of Education, which Kallen estimates could be completed “in two or three months”.
Tiago Brandão Rodrigues will lead the investigation of the incidents of the “Champions” final
On May 28, the impossibility of sending spectators with valid tickets on time caused a 36-minute delay in the start of the match, causing chaotic situations at the entrance to the Saint-Denis stadium, on the outskirts of Paris.
UEFA’s disarray and frenzy among Liverpool fans led to chaos (and unprecedented delay) in the Champions League final
Pushing, attempts to enter without entry, fans mistreated by the security forces or victims of robberies were witnesses of those who attended the game. Some fans couldn’t even get in, even though they supposedly had valid tickets.
“The causes are various: transport strikes, bad reactions from those attending the venue, the security forces and a very high flow near the stadium of people without tickets or with false tickets,” observed Kallen.
Both the French government and the British authorities spared no criticism.with the French Minister of the Interior speaking of a “massive, industrial and organized counterfeit banknote fraud” and the London government calling for a “full investigation” into what happened, with public conclusions.
Source: Observadora
