Sometimes, you want to watch a football game. Sometimes, you want to do so spontaneously. The you go online, google for tickets, find tickets being sold by companies like Stubhub, buy them, and you are looking forward to the game. No, unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. At least if you buy tickets via StubHub.
Me and a friend of mine went to Porto last week. We didn’t plan anything in particular but when we arrived we saw crowds of Juventus Turin fans. We immediately decided to look for short-term tickets and after a quick google search it turned out that last-minute tickets were available via StubHub.
Ha-ha. How naive we were. I paid more than 100€ for each ticket, but the „contact person“ was not at the place indicated in the mail. Consumer service didn’t seem to care either, simply informing me that „no refund will be given and there is nothing we can do in your case“. The Fan Protect Guarantee mentioned on their website is thus virtually non-existent. In other words: you can simply sell tickets without ever handing them over. Perhaps they were even sold twice, I don’t know.
That being said, if you want to watch a football game, just go to the stadium, more than enough people selling tickets there, even at Champions League games apparently. It’s cheaper, less complicated and, most surprisingly, much more reliable. Interesting to see that big companies like StubHub are the ones that rip you off and that random strangers in front of a football stadium are the ones you should do business with if you want to buy tickets.
Ralph Janik 