How Hertha’s card chaos came about for the game against HSV
Stand: 17.05.2022 | Reading time: 3 minutes
Hertha BSC’s relegation first leg against HSV is ill-fated. Due to confusion with ticket sales, there could be more Hamburg fans than Berlin fans in the Olympic Stadium on Thursday. Hertha’s leadership has already apologized.
Dhe anger and lack of understanding are great. “Why are you starting the free sale? What’s wrong with you !!! “, Hertha fan Justin Franke tweeted, along with the request: “Shame on you! So the ticketing!” Sascha Alexander, another supporter of the Berliners, who have to play their first relegation game against Hamburger SV on Thursday (8.30 p.m., in the sports ticker at WELT), wrote: “You can’t be serious. That can’t be beat for unprofessionalism. The home game becomes the away game.”
The anger of the fans is the reaction to a series of bankruptcies, bad luck and mishaps – which can actually mean that there could be more Hamburger than Berlin fans present in the first leg in the Berlin Olympic Stadium. This could mean that the hosts, who slipped to third place in the table after a 1-2 draw in Dortmund and a 2-1 win by VfB Stuttgart against 1. FC Köln on the last day of the Bundesliga match, could give them their psychologically important advantage at home hand over to the third-placed team in the second division.
What happened? First of all, after it had been established that Hertha would have to stay in detention, advance sales began as scheduled. From Saturday, 6 p.m., club members could purchase eight tickets each. Season tickets should also be valid for the additional home game. However, this was not sufficiently communicated by the club.
Hertha sent annual ticket holders a code by email. This would have made it possible to unlock the map for the game. However, since some season ticket holders did not know this, they bought tickets. They then reacted accordingly angrily.
How the anger of Hertha fans increased
On Monday at 12 o’clock the free sale was started. However, the Hertha website was apparently unable to cope with the onslaught and collapsed in the meantime. This created new confusion. Then the HSV reported that the guest contingent – 7500 tickets – “was sold out within a few minutes”. However, several Hamburg fans then posted that they had still managed to stock up on large quantities of tickets from Hertha’s online shops. This increased the Berlin fan anger again. “We’re being taken over and you’re not doing anything about it,” complained one follower.
The fear is that a scenario like that in Barcelona a month ago could loom on Thursday. At that time, fans of Eintracht Frankfurt had bought significantly more tickets than they were entitled to before the second leg in the quarter-finals of the Europa League. Over 30,000 Eintracht supporters were at the Camp Nou and made the game their home game. Frankfurt won 3-2, advanced to the semi-finals and then to the final.
“I will provide information on this at the general meeting,” announced Hertha’s financial director Ingo Schiller. He could understand the frustration of the followers. “Been on this path: We didn’t solve it well and I apologize to all those affected,” Schiller tweeted.
The card chaos is another incident that is likely to cloud the atmosphere at the general meeting on May 29th. There will be more than enough discussion material in Hall 20 of the Berlin trade fairs – regardless of which league you belong to in the coming season.
In the meantime, two motions to vote out President Werner Gegenbauer have been submitted. A power struggle has been raging for months between the entrepreneur, who has headed the association since 2008, and the investor Lars Windhorst, who now holds 66.6 percent of the shares in the spin-off corporation through his company Tennor Holding.