Touts score £10m off finals fans

Touts score £10m off finals fans

Ticket touts will make more than £10m in the next week by cashing in on the success of Britain's football teams in Europe and at home. With Glasgow Rangers set to take on Russia's Zenit St Petersburg in the Uefa Cup final on Wednesday and Chelsea playing Manchester United on 21 May in the Champions League final, sellers are offering tickets for up to 2,000 per cent above their face value.

Even the forthcoming FA Cup final between the two less glamorous sides of Portsmouth and Cardiff City next Saturday is proving a massive money-spinner for the touts with tickets with a face value of between £35 and £95 selling for anything between £390 and £890.

An estimated 80,000 tickets to the three finals are not being sold direct to the competing teams' fans, suggesting touts will be able to procure tens of thousands of tickets from third parties and sell them on.

Prices have been inflated by the scarcity of the tickets. The Rangers Zenit final is being played at Manchester City's stadium which has a capacity of only 47,000. Both Rangers and Zenit fans have been allotted just 13,000 tickets each which means many are struggling to obtain a seat through legal channels.

For the Manchester United and Chelsea clash, both sets of fans have been allocated 21,000 tickets each. The Moscow stadium where the game will be played holds 69,500 - substantially fewer than the major European stadia such as Wembley, which holds 90,000 spectators......continued below

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On Friday tickets to the Uefa Cup final were illegally being offered for sale on eBay.co.uk by sellers in Canada and Ireland for up to £520

Ebay said the ads for the Uefa Cup tickets would be removed and that it had a strict policy prohibiting the sale of football tickets on its UK website. The company said it regularly removed the ads from its site and used filters to search out rogue sellers.

In Manchester, where 3,000 Uefa Cup tickets were sold to local football fans, touts were offering £75 tickets to Rangers supporters at £1,500 a pair.

Cheap-tickets4u.com is offering a corporate hospitality package for the Champions League final, which includes transport to and from the game, a match ticket and a stay in a hotel for £2,450.

But potential buyers are warned to be wary. It is illegal to resell football tickets in the UK - unless it is through an official, recognised third party. However, many of the online firms are able to flout the law by operating offshore, out of reach of the UK authorities.

One notorious site, theonlineticket.com, is offering tickets for the Champions League final, which sell for between £40 and £100 at face value, for between £650 and £2,000 - a 1,900 per cent increase in the case of the most expensive tickets. And although it claims to be well established in the British hospitality industry, the company's website is owned by an anonymous company based in Phoenix, Arizona.

Several fans have complained about the site which was once run by Terance Shepherd, the legendary ticket tout whose companies often ended up going bust leaving people out of pocket.