May 13 – UEFA and the Local Organising Committee of EURO 2016 have announced ticket prices as cheap as €25 for next year’s tournament with the aim of making the matches accessible to all fans.
The tournament will start June 10 and culminate with the final a month later at the Stade de France. There will be nine other venues in Bordeaux, Lens, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Nice, Paris, St-Etienne, and Toulouse respectively. France hosted the inaugural tournament in 1960 as well as the finals in 1984.
A first application phase for tickets will open in June with one million tickets on sale. The cheapest ticket will cost €25 and will be available for 43 of the 51 games, notable exceptions are the opening match, the semi-finals and the final. Prices for Euro 2012 in Poland/Ukraine tickets ranged from €30 to €600.
“In order to ensure the success of this great festival of European football, we wanted a ticketing policy that was in line with our lofty ambitions for the tournament,” said EURO 2016 SAS president Jacques Lambert. “We wanted a ticketing procedure that was user-friendly and transparent, in which everyone – no matter where they were in the world – had the same chances of obtaining tickets via a single portal.”
“We wanted to focus our pricing policy on access for the general public,” said Euro 2016 director of ticketing and hospitality Philippe Margraff. “Of the 1.8 million tickets reserved for fans, 75% are for the general public. 800,000 will be reserved for fans of the participating teams.” One individual will be limited to purchasing only one ticket.
UEFA will also donate 20,000 tickets to deprived children all over France as part of the 20,000 Smiles for the EURO programme, according to the governing body’s official website.
As well as the various corporate packages, a number of what are being called ‘Destination tickets’ are available. Buyers, for €290, receive two Category 1 tickets in a single stadium.
‘Follow my team tickets’ (enabling fans to follow their team all the way to the final) will not be made available until after the December 15 draw.
UEFA are running a ticket exchange enabling ticket buyers to sell-on unwanted tickets at face value. World Cup 98 in France was a ticket tout heaven. UEFA is hoping that with the sales portal for unwanted tickets, the heat will be taken out of the scalping market and fans will not be sucked into buying illegal, often counterfeit, tickets. There will be no stadium ticket sales.
Registration for the ticket buying windows is now open online at https://euro2016.tickets.uefa.com/lottery/welcome_en.html
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