Borussia Dortmund has introduced some innovations regarding ticket sales for the second half of the season. However, BVB refrained from one idea.
Borussia Dortmund has changed its ticketing system again for the second half of the season. The raffle of tickets introduced at the beginning of the season has been abandoned.
At the beginning of the season, BVB had redesigned its ticket sales for one-day tickets. After consultation with fan representatives, a so-called application and lottery procedure was introduced in order to give as many Borussia supporters as possible the chance to win a ticket, as demand was enormously high.
Interested parties could apply for a ticket for a specific home match and category within a time corridor. After that, a draw was made among the registered applicants. Members were given priority. This was intended to bring more fairness and transparency to the allocation of the remaining contingents for the individual home matches in the 81,365-seater stadium after deducting the 55,000 season tickets and the guest tickets.
After less than half a year, this experiment has failed. “Borussia Dortmund is taking advantage of the longer winter break to adjust and further optimise day ticket sales at individual points in the interests of the fans,” the club now announced via its club website.
After discussions with the fan council, which includes the BVB fan department, the BVB fan project, the ultra group “The Unity” and schwatzgelb.de, and another round of talks open to all fan clubs, the decision was made to change the procedure again. “From the second half of the season onwards, day tickets for home and away matches will be sold exclusively via the online shop, as BVB can largely dispense with the upstream application and lottery procedure based on the experience gained in the first half of the season,” BVB wrote. Apparently, demand was lower than expected.
In the future, games will always be released at 12.00 noon – initially only for members. Whether there will be free sales to non-members beyond that will be decided from match to match. In addition, there will be a virtual waiting room to avoid overloading the system. Only in the case of absolute top matches with excessive demand does the club reserve the right to revert to the procedure used in the first half of the season.
It will remain the case that tickets for BVB matches will only be available virtually or for print@home. However, starting in the second half of the season, several ticket machines will be set up in the stadium where fans can print out a “hard ticket” as a souvenir. This is in response to the wishes of many fans.
