Real Madrid struggling to get fans to travel to Ukraine for the Champions League Final
By Ben Sundock
The Champions League Final between Real Madrid and Liverpool is less than a week and a half away. However, the Spanish club is struggling to sell their ticket allotment for the match due to the difficulty in traveling to Kyiv, Ukraine. Here are the details.
This may come as a surprise to some, but Ukraine is not easy to get to. Even if you live in Europe.
In fact, it is so difficult to get to, many Real Madrid members, season ticket holders, and even staff members at the club don’t want to travel to the Final on May 26th.
The club was given 16,626 tickets by UEFA to give and sell to fans who wanted to see their team go for their third straight European title. Nearly two weeks after releasing the tickets to the public, about 800 of that 16,000 still remain.
According to Marca, the headache that is flying to Kyiv, finding a hotel room in the city, and going to the match is too much for many Madridstas who would rather watch from the comfort of their home (and save their money as well).
The Spanish tabloid headquartered in the capital has been covering the difficulty that is making it to Eastern Europe next weekend for the conclusion of the club campaign.
Not only are hotel rooms hard to come by, with reports indicating that the average room is going for a stunning €700, but the flights from Madrid are nearly non-existent as well. There are no direct flights out of the Barajas Airport and the cheapest available flight is going for a mear $1,229 and has a travel time of nearly 10 hours.
Based on my research through a few travel agency websites, if you were to leave Madrid at 14:55 on Thursday the 24th, after a short flight to Prague and a five-hour layover, you would not arrive in Kyiv until 2 a.m. on Friday.
If you were thinking of taking the alternative driving route, guess again. The drive would take roughly 18 hours and is probably not worth the 36-hour round-trip for one match.
The trip will be even more difficult for Liverpool fans who have farther to go, leading some to believe that the epic final between two clubs drenched in history could take place in a stadium not filled to capacity.
Looking ahead to the 2019 Champions League Final, it makes more sense why fans might not want to travel and spend a large sum of money. Next year’s final will take place in the Spanish capital at Atletico Madrid’s new stadium, the Wanda Metropolitano.
This is just the third time in the last 18-years that the UCL Final has not been held in western Europe with the other two locations being Istanbul, Turkey in 2005 and Moscow, Russia hosting in 2008.
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I personally don’t understand why UEFA would want to have a Final so far away from where many of the teams competing in the competition reside. A team from Russia nor Ukraine has ever made it to a Champions League Final.
In fact, the only team from Ukraine, Dynamo Kyiv, failed to make it out of the third-qualifying round of the tournament, falling to Swiss side, Young Boys.
Next time UEFA, pick a better, more central location so the fans of the club can actually go to the match without having to spend thousands and thousands of dollars.