The Big Story: “Fake” Tickets and the Champions League Final:
Big Ideas:
- “30-40,000 fake tickets” was the starting point.
- Some fans never made it into the ground or it was halftime before they made it.
- The next day, French fans storm the pitch with smoke bombs in Saint-Etienne.
France, call me.
The Champions League Final at the Stade de France outside of Paris became a fiasco on Saturday night as fans were locked outside of the stadium with valid tickets, tear gassed, and made to stand in dangerous conditions for several hours.
This one sucks because the Final of the Champions League is one of those events that I have on my list of must attend events.
The game was delayed for 36 minutes, but that really doesn’t tell the full story and whatever happened on the pitch was overshadowed by what was going on outside the stadium, and from the looks of it probably impacted the Liverpool team as well since their fans were the majority of people that seemed to be suffering.
Anyway, let’s look at a few topics here.
The claim of massive fraud was ridiculous from the start. In my years around tickets, in the most egregious cases, “massive fraud” would have been less than 1% of tickets for an event.
As the reports came out of what was really going down, it seems that the issue was a lack of proper training, scanning machines that were malfunctioning, and a small mix of fans trying to crash the gates and/or with fraudulent tickets.
From a project management standpoint, the key issue here is enabling people to make decisions and take action quickly in a dynamic situation. In this instance, if reports end up being true, the police, stadium staff, and officials on the ground were all held back by a chain of command that was slow to react and didn’t turn over operational authority to their staff.
On the side of the fraudelent ticket argument, from a crisis communication standpoint, the coverup is worse than the crime and you are better off saying nothing than making up easily disproven claims.
Remember the old saying from Harry Truman, “the buck stops here”. When dealing with a fast moving, problematic situation, use that advice.
As things were being fixed or resolved, there is the challenge of fans that never made it into the ground or only made it after being delayed for the better part of the first half.
I’m sympathetic to this because people may never get another chance to see their team play for the title.
People have built up this experience as being the pinnacle of their fandom.
Then, it is all ripped away through no fault of their own.
How these people are made whole will be interesting to watch.
I’m not sure if nothing will be done for them, but what a mess this is from a relationship to the team and the game.
As many commentators have pointed out, the issues around French soccer have been building recently and there was an additional situation at the ground in Saint-Etienne on Sunday where folks stormed the pitch with smoke bombs.
This is dangerous and following another smoke bomb being tossed on the pitch during the North London Derby, makes security a much bigger concern because we’ve seen smoke bombs, yes, but also many instances of fans storming the pitch around Europe.
Lots could go wrong.
How do we deal with all of this coming out of a season of football that was exciting, but also showed the strain folks are feeling and the limits of the best-laid plans?
Action Items:
- Review your plans for holding an event. After the pandemic caught everyone flat-footed, I think it is important to review all of your action plans and backup plans to ensure that there is a course of action for the worst-case scenario.
- Think customer first. It seems like there wasn’t much the fans could have done differently here, but the entire experience leading into the stadium could have been more thoughtfully pulled together.
- Understand that people are stretched thin and struggling from the continued strains of the pandemic, the cost of living crisis, and life right now. This means that attention to mental health is important, but you can expect to see folks act out in unusual ways. So you have to be prepared.