UEFA: No Tickets Left

If you were waiting until the last minute (or, as it stands, the last 8,600 minutes) before Euro 2008 to book your flights and buy your tickets, I have the least surprising news ever for you. You’re not going to get in, or at the very least, you’re not going to be buying your ticket from any non-felon legal ticket distributor. Because all 1.05 million tickets for Euro 2008 are sold. Only 33% of the golden Euro tickets were ever available to the public anyway, with the rest going to participating nations, sponsors, UEFA members, etc. But those 347,000 public tickets are all gone.

Obviously, no surprise here. Like my old grandma always said, if you want to go to the biggest football event of the year, you might want to get tickets more than a week ahead of time. Sage advice. If you do plan on going and trying your luck, there are a few things to remember.

First, try not to make a mess. Vienna is a very nice city, and it would be a shame to make it look like Manchester a few weeks back. Second, be prepared to pay … a lot. The people who will be selling tickets around the Euro stadia will not be folks that just happened to double book their schedule, and sadly had to miss the game. They will have bought their tickets planning to resell them, and you can bet they planned to make a bit of profit on it. Thirdly, of course, when you do buy tickets from a guy in a trenchcoat around back of the pub three streets over from the stadium, there is always the off chance that those tickets might not be completely genuine. That’s the thing about the black market – it’s pretty much buyer beware.