I'm sitting in the barbers the day before yesterday getting my hair cut for Madrid and Marie the owner is made up, times have been hard with the ketwig boom stealing her younger regular customers but she's experiencing a pre-Madrid rush. Practically everyone's had the same idea as me and trade is good today. The conversation between the customers is like a seasoned travel agents convention, 'I'm out of Liverpool to Porto, Porto to Madrid-overland, then out from Madrid to Milan, Milan Manchester'. Marie's not going herself, but counts herself lucky to have tickets for the Aintree Racecourse screening as they have been long sold out, just like the massive Echo Arena and every other venue, from the big arenas to local bars and alehouses, you can't get tickets for screenings in Liverpool never mind the match. Yet there is a party atmosphere around the city, flags everywhere and an estimated 70, 000 traveling to Madrid most without tickets
Despite most customers being regular match goers, there is hardly a ticket amongst us waiting for our pre-match haircut, there's an ,acceptance that there's no tickets going in Liverpool, normal channels are all closed. One lucky lad has two tickets from the ballot for him and his mate and tells us a tout he knows phoned him up offering £10 000, if that's what the touts will pay cost price what are they knocking them out to the corporates for. There is an acceptance that this time there really are no tickets to be had, a general feeling we're going out for the atmosphere, a bit of Shevchenko Park in Kiev, a bit of sun. a bit of continental culture, a bit of Jamie Webster and a chance to see old friends, none of us are paying tout money for tickets and a modern football stadium for a change, it's going to be hard to get in.
Most of us are going over to participate in a carnival, that's the mood. We are ripped off by travel companies, by the hotels, by the Airbnb's but most of all by UEFA. The UEFA Fat Cats, an organisation where the next corruption scandal is always bubbling under, an organisation that takes a football legend and turns him into a disreputable nobody, an organisation that is designed not for football, their cover, but to make obscene amounts of money, where they all have their snouts firmly planted in the trough. Their tickets are already at tout prices, nearly £500 for a match ticket is obscene but in their completely out of touch corporate surroundings why not add a bit on, it's only the mug punters who are stupid enough to love the game, it's nothing in the grand scheme but it all adds up. They and their grotesque 'UEFA Family' steal the game from us the ordinary fans and brazenly sell it on, never thinking for a moment about fans as they count their spoils, thinking of new ways to extend their wealth. They do occasionally think of the fans, as a handy excuse when their organisational incompetence goes wrong. Baku. They pre planned that two years in advance, they're a joke.
There's a worry and it wont go away. UEFA's greed and total incompetence at organising has consequences. last year in Kiev, the Kiev Police where brilliant, they encouraged the carnival, set limits but allowed the celebration in Shevenko Park space to breathe, the fans were brilliant, Boss night and the organisers were brilliant, Liverpool the club were brilliant, they got involved in fan culture listened to us and the event was a massive success. so UEFA's organisational incompetence was covered for another year, but can they get away with it again this year? I hope so but things aren't looking good.
Liverpool fans travel, it's a given, it's our culture, passed on from father to child, my daughter's coming with me to Madrid, my Dad took his kids on the train to Rome. It's predictable. It can be planned for. If your organisation's greed and unfair ticket allocation means that there are going to be tens of thousands of fans without tickets it makes sense to plan for that It's not even that hard. Stick some massive screens in the fan parks and keep the carnival going. Open the biggest capacity ground in Madrid, the Santiago Bernabeu with massive screens, if they weren't so completely out of touch and incompetent they would realise, they could make money out of that as well as looking after public safety as a side-line to their major concern, maximising revenue and influence, a lot of work to be done to catch up to those Olympic levels of influence, but we're not far off, eh boys!
Liverpool Football Club, The Mayor of Liverpool can all see before the event that things need organising and have tried knocking their heads against the UEFA wall. It's not a good idea to shut the fan parks early and expect 30,000 people to find a bar to watch the match in, it's going to be a logistical nightmare. It is a completely foreseeable problem that needs some basic planning to sort out, but even that is beyond UEFA's capabilities and inclination. Add into the equation the Spanish Police who's policing of football fans is still stuck in the dark ages, where football fans aren't people but cattle to be batoned about and horded into pens and the situation becomes more worrying. The latest frankly frightening proclamation, is that they're shutting the fan park at 6pm but police are going to be stopping drinking at 5pm, this is asking for trouble, you don't stop a party with a big stick and tear gas. It doesn't take a genius to foresee serious trouble. Liverpool fans are out to party, to enjoy the carnival but add in a few thousand indiscriminate baton wealing police and the mood can quickly change to one of chaos and mayhem. We have all the ingredients being assembled for a total disaster here, yet this can be forseen and easily avoided with some basic planning. If we can see it in Marie's barbers, how come these incompetents in charge of the event can't. UEFA are so out of touch, this basic planning is unlikely to take place, much easier to do nothing and then blame the fans afterwards, they've got past form as an organisation.
I hope that the picture I've painted doesn't come to fruition that UEFA's complete disregard for fans doesn't play out the way I fear but if it doesn't happen it won't be because of competent planning but pure luck and football fans who put up with being ripped off and treated like dirt, but find ingenious ways to overcome and get around this, fans who despite the troubles want nothing more than to enjoy themselves rather than let the poor organisation from the top spoil their carnival. This is the third European final for Liverpool in recent times and you get blasé about the ridiculous places, the inappropriate grounds, the UEFA Touting Family, stealing your tickets, the ridiculous price of tickets and the appalling organisation for the ordinary fans while the UEFA gravy train rolls into town, growing more corpulent and obscene every year. Let's hope we win and we all get back safely, if we do, it will be because of ourselves, luck and will have nothing to do those who leach on us.
