The Premier Soccer League's (PSL) explanations and the lack of clarification from Open Tickets and Computicket on the chaos that ensued when 10,000 extra tickets were sold for Saturday's Nedbank Cup final at Moses Mabhida Stadium have left more questions than answers.
The most important question is, ‘how?’ How do established ticketing companies sell thousands of extra tickets for one of the highest-profile events in South African sport, a Kaizer-Chiefs-Orlando Pirates Soweto derby, and one in a cup final no less?
The answer to that question provided in a PSL press conference in Durban on Thursday was underwhelming in its sufficiency.
Stadium Management South Africa (SMSA) CEO Bertie Grobbelaar, roped in by the PSL to try to help it unravel the mess, gave an astute breakdown of the numbers. He could not elaborate on the reasons for Open Tickets and Computicket's system breaking down further than saying it stemmed from “a glitch or call it whatever you want, but the fact is the tickets went on sale and the system allowed more people to make payments than there is capacity for”.
He suggested the huge demand and rush for tickets when they went on sale at 10am on Monday resulted in the system failure. There remains the question of why tickets for such a huge game went on sale just days before.
Grobbelaar said, with 41,000 tickets on sale for the public, “digital tickets on the Open Tickets website, 2,435 [were sold]; and on the Computicket website, 44,121 tickets were sold. That immediately tells you there's over-issuing of tickets.”
Grobbelaar said more than 10,000 tickets were over-issued, and he and PSL acting CEO Mato Madlala said those purchasers would be or had been informed and refunded.
However, the damage was done. The Sowetan reported some supporters travelling to the game from outside Durban who falsely believed they had purchased tickets had spent thousands on travel and accommodation. Some said, given this, they would travel to the city nonetheless and try to gain access to the stadium buying tickets from touts, which is expensive and illegal.
Quite why Grobbelaar had been even roped in to try to answer such questions raised more questions. Again, the explanation for that seemed vague and strange.
He is the CEO of SMSA, the company that oversees FNB Stadium, Orlando Stadium and Rand Stadium in Johannesburg, and has nothing to do with Moses Mabhida Stadium.
Madlala said she had brought in Grobbelaar as an “auditor” to try to unravel what had gone wrong, given his experience hosting derbies at FNB. He had to stress he was not speaking on behalf of Open Tickets and Computicket, neither of whom had representatives present to answer on the details of what went wrong.
It seems unfortunate, too, that this had to happen in football. While the PSL seems to have had no direct fault in the glitch and system failure by the ticketing companies, the image of a sport that already has a reputation for big live matches often being an uncomfortable experience for attending supporters due to poor traffic management around grounds and access into stadiums is tarnished further.
And authorities have been left scrambling to caution all fans who initially thought they had been successful buying tickets, only to receive messages they were in fact not, not to go to Moses Mabhida on Saturday. For a game that already raised concerns for a venue that might be challenging due to being too small for a Soweto derby cup final — FNB holds 94,000 people, Moses Mabhida 50,000 — that is also a far from ideal situation.
It would be welcome if the PSL could investigate the incident further and report back on their findings to the public. It is an organisation that has a reputation for lacking complete transparency where there is controversy, though, so that seems unlikely.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.