A ticketing issue has affected preparations for the Nedbank Cup final, the Premier Soccer League revealed today.
10510 tickets were sold over the stadium's official capacity and are now being refunded. This comes after tickets for the highly anticipated Soweto Derby between Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates went on sale on Monday.
The Open Tickets system subsequently crashed on Tuesday morning, which the service provider blamed on “unprecedented demand.”
On Monday, the PSL assembled to deal with the problem, where acting CEO Mato Madlala appointed the Stadium Management CEO Berti Grobbelaar to serve as an independent auditor to investigate.
STADIUM MANAGEMENT EXPLAINS HOW TICKETING SYSTEM CRASHED
“I’m not representing Open Tickets or Stadium Management, the PSL asked me to analyse numbers,” Grobbelaar stated during the Nedbank Cup press conference on Wednesday.
“Is there not an issue of overselling of tickets… The capacity of the stadium is 49 307 seats, a reduced capacity but the capacity on the number of tickets that were issued – 41 000 general access tickets went on sale.
“According to the preliminary report, the minute the tickets opened it was sold out in 90 minutes. That caused a breach. Fact is tickets went on sale; the system allowed more people to make payments then there is capacity for.
“Open Tickets stopped the platform from issuing physical tickets but the payments still went through.
“From the overissuing of tickets, 19 561 had to be allocated to people that paid but did not get their tickets. 10 501 tickets were paid for but were overcapacity and those people had to be refunded.
“All people to the capacity of the stadium have received their tickets, either in hard copy or digital. There were no more tickets issued than the capacity allows for.
“Of the people that paid but cannot be allocated a ticket due to the overcapacity, 80% as we speak, everyone that bought online were refunded. The other 20%, people that paid via EFT or other form of payment platform have all received messages and will be refunded via EFT.
“From an event safety perspective for tomorrow there is people that were allocated but didn’t get tickets and were refunded or are in the process of being refunded. The people that paid for tickets up until capacity all received their tickets.”
