Missing tickets for the final: scandal and untidiness between AFA leaders and Argentine fans

DOHA (special envoy).- Hours before the final, hundreds of Argentines are still adrift through various points in Doha in search of tickets for the historic match between Messi’s National Team and France. What started as a rumor became over the hours. in a real scandal in a building in the West Bay area, where the leading offices of the Argentine Football Association have their offices.

According to the testimony of several fans with whom LA NACION was able to speak this Saturday, it all started with messages in the Instagram and WhatsApp groups shared by Argentines here in Doha. The information said that a building in the La Perla area, AFA leaders were selling tickets for the final at the official FIFA price.

The place was immediately filled with fans. “We arrived at La Perla and ahead of us they were selling tickets, until an AFA leader came out who told us there were no more and sent us to the West Bay area,” Ezequiel, a young man who arrived in Doha, tells LA NACION at the beginning of the World Cup. Together with him, a group of about forty people were waiting seated on the 12th floor of the Darwish Tower building.

The desperation to find a ticket has increased in the last few hours and as the start time of the final approaches. Category 1 corresponds to the sector where the bulk of the Argentine fans are located, behind one of the goals. The official price is 604 dollars (almost 200 thousand pesos). But in resale, That same ticket is being offered at approximately 3,000 dollars (close to one million Argentine pesos). An impossible price to face for the hundreds of Argentines who have been there since the first game and who want the AFA to release tickets at the official price.

The fans denounced that during this Saturday it was several relatives of soccer players from the National Team, former players (among them the former Boca DT, Sebastián Battaglia) and some characterized fans who are here in Doha who got tickets. “There were tickets,” says another young woman who is next to her father in the corridor of the Darwish Tower. Several of the Argentines assure that from the AFA they were selling tickets.

The person who sent them from one building to another was Facundo Rainone, who said that he “works in the logistics part in Buenos Aires” of the AFA.

On the marble floor of the luxurious office and apartment building in the West Bay area, the Argentines had been sitting for a couple of hours. Until Emilio Vázquez, Ticketing manager of the entity chaired by Claudio “Chiqui” Tapia, appeared.

Through Vázquez, the tickets that the AFA receives for the relatives of the players or club leaders, for example, are channeled. That’s why, It is not very clear how to establish if there are excess tickets. And, if there are, establish if they are sold at the official price, or if someone charges a surplus along the way.

“We don’t have tickets here, this closed the day before yesterday for us,” said Vázquez, dressed in a white T-shirt and jogging pants from the National Team before those present. When the Argentines asked him where they could get the tickets, the manager replied: “On Fifa.com.” Immediately came the demand from the public, which rose in tone. “This would be solved with tickets, if I had I would give each one one and that’s it. But we do not have, nor do we sell, nor are we organizers,” Vázquez replied.

The conversation began to mix with some insults for which Vázquez had to be escorted by four policemen through the building’s service elevator.

Behind Vázquez, Rainone insisted on the AFA’s position: “The person in charge of the area has already left to tell them that there are no tickets and that unfortunately there will not be any,” he said and once again tempers began to flare. Rainone also had to leave escorted by the Qatari police amid insults and shouts from the fans.

Vázquez is in charge of managing tickets at events such as the World Cup, and was already involved in another similar episode in the run-up to the World Cup final in Brazil, when Argentina lost to Germany. Thousands of fans were fighting for a ticket and the AFA sold tickets at the official price hours before that final at the Maracana.

As Vázquez himself said at the time, they received a remnant of tickets that FIFA gave them and which they later sold at the “official price”. And he clarified that “nobody overpaid for those tickets.” However, the complaints of the obfuscated fans multiplied and in Brazil a file was opened against the leaders of the AFA for supposed ticket resale.

In 2006, Julio Humberto Grondona himself and his son, Humberto, were involved in a similar scandal. At the hotel where the former AFA boss and then FIFA treasurer was staying, father and son sold tickets in person. While Don Julio cut the checkbook for the fans who were queuing in the hotel lobby, Humbertito collected and kept the euros in a paper bag on the floor.