When a 10th placed Bundesliga club draws against Barcelona at home and then beats them 3-2 at the famous Camp Nou (it was 3-0 until the 90th minute), than it’s not a scandal for famous club like Barcelona, who were the favorites to win the Europa League. But when around 30.000 away fans ‘occupy’ Camp Nou and make themselves feel at home, than it’s a Catalonian scandal. It was easy for Barcelona’s players and coach to moan about the atmosphere at their own stadium rather than analyze the debacle against average Bundesliga team. Eintracht Frankfurt played a beautiful game, and won honestly and deservedly, and 27000 Germans were there to witness it. But how did it happen?Furious, detested, occupied: Laporta and Xavi demand an investigationIn a press conference called just for that, president Joan Laporta, along with various club’s official explained to the furious fans what actually happened that day at the ticket office. And to conclude his explanation in one sentence: Tickets were sold to the Germans due to disloyal Barcelona fans and an old ticket system, inherited from the previous board. Off course, this is the conclusion which comes after you hear Laporta’s explanation, and he was wise enough not to conclude things like this, but in a much smoother way.Thousands of Eintracht Frankfurt fans in Camp Nou after the German side knocked Barcelona out of the Europa League.🎥 @HelenaCondis pic.twitter.com/lgvkQFJnYC— Get Spanish Football News (@GSpanishFN) April 14, 2022 For starters, he thanked all fans who attended the match and supported Barca even thou it was Easter and he also apologized to them due to a large German presence (but not the result).“The control mechanisms on the website were outdated and insufficient. We have inherited this system from the previous board, we thought it could work, but we have seen that for big games it doesn’t. We understand that the club is not to blame for what happened, but the club is responsible. The club did not sell tickets to German fans, except for the 5,000 marked by UEFA, the VIP boxes and another 238 that went to the Germans due to a computer error that was quickly detected. Now we will do it match by match. Tickets will now be non-transferrable for non-domestic matches and high-risk games. We are working on other measures so that it does not happen again” said Laporta.30,000 Eintracht Frankfurt fans marching through Barcelona on their way to the Camp Nou. All in white.What a sight. #SGE #FCBSGE pic.twitter.com/OXw6Vunm75— Felix Tamsut (@ftamsut) April 14, 2022 So, this is what happened. Attendance that night was 79,468, out of which 34,435 were Frankfurt fans. Of that number, 5000 were ‘legally’ sent to the club, due to UEFA rules. The remaining number, around 29,500 looked like this: 1,500 tickets were sold at the box office (with a passport or ID); 23,427 sold online; and 3,670 through tour operators. The Club also rejected 27,201 purchases by IP or German card, so the system was working ‘until it overflowed’, as Laporta put it. So, a large number of those 23000 were actually sold to Germans by Barca fans, who wanted to earn some money, since some of them had discounts for those tickets, and they resell them to Frankfurt fans.”We do know the members who bought tickets and it was for Germans, more than 7,400. We saw that they were on the side of the third tier. And subscriptions were not few, because we saw it in other areas of the stadium. That of members who bought a ticket and went to Germans”, explained the president.Another Camp Nou shocker! Relegation-zone Cadiz hit Barca on the break and deserve the winBarca’s supremo also explained that 40 percent of the tickets went to residents of Catalonia, whether or not they were members of Barcelona, and when the Germans realized that the system is blocking them from buying tickets online due to their German ID cards and IP addresses, they used booking agents and this other option to buy such a number of tickets. And here it is, the whole truth. But, the fact remains that Barcelona lost to a mediocre Bundesliga team and also against La Liga relegation strugglers Cadiz yesterday.
