Scandal reveals the sale of Super Cup Tickets
By Tea Mariamidze
Wednesday, June 24
UEFA Super Cup fans are not able to purchase tickets for Barcelona-Seville game to be held on August 11, 2015 on Dinamo Arena, Tbilisi.
The Football Federation of Georgia called upon the fans to buy tickets only on authorized web-site biletebi.ge, but most users were unable to buy them. The delays caused serious discontent among the fans, for the match is very important and only 30,000 tickets are on sale.
Greater dissatisfaction caused the post on the Facebook page of the web-site “Ticket sales” delayed because of the hacker attack on the site.
The site has a contract with the UEFA, which will get 45,000 Gel for selling the match tickets in Georgia, but due to delays the fans demanded that the Football Federation to break off the contract and find another way of selling tickets without problems.
The administration of biletebi.ge explained that because of the large number of users the site overloaded and technical problems arose.
They denied the rumors that the tickets are still secretly being sold.
According to the technical director of the site Giorgi Chkhikvishvili, the site could not stand the great number of people from Georgia and abroad accessing page at once and so blocked access.
"I want to calm down the fans that there are sold only a few tickets; because of a large load, the site stopped functioning," he said.
Chkhikvishvili assured that the problem will soon be solved, because biletebi.ge has purchased expensive special equipment for elimination of technical faults.
The head of the Football Federation, Zviad Sichinava, stated that the administration of the site is doing everything it can to solve the problem.
“The site was calculated to have 2,500 users per minute; but in this case, there were 10,000 users per minute and the site crashed,” he said.
According to the General Secretary of Football Federation Rezi Arveladze, the situation is not as dramatic as people perceive and the only aim of everyone is to deal with the problem in time.
“In case the site cannot cope with the problem, the Football Federation and UEFA will find another ways to sell the tickets, which will be announced,” he stated.
It should be noted that it is for the first time that such an important and high-rank match is to be held in Georgia and it is natural that in a city with a 1.5 million population, 30,000 tickets will not be enough for the fans.
