PAO director reveals Final Four ticket numbers, talks All-EuroLeague / News - Basketnews.com

More than 30,000 Panathinaikos fans applied for Final Four tickets, the club's executive Dimitris Kontos revealed.

Credit: Vangelis Stolis Credit Vangelis Stolis

The upcoming EuroLeague Final Four will feature three active traveling fanbases. As such, the demand for tickets has been immense ever since the participants became clear.

Points this season

49%82,4Points made:82,4Accuracy:48,5%Place in standings:7Record max:99Record min:65Best scorer:Kendrick NunnTeamEuroLeagueStatisticsSchedule

With just over a week left until the festivities, the league announced the All-EuroLeague teams which caused controversy among the players. It featured three Panathinaikos AKTOR Athens players out of the ten selected.

The club's Sports Director, Dimitris Kontos, spoke to Greek television ERT about the season and the overwhelming demand for tickets by PAO fans.

"The truth is that individual titles are not enough for a team like Panathinaikos if we do not have team success at the end of the year," Kontos admitted, referencing to the All-EuroLeague Team selections. "It is very important that this season our team has 3 of the 10 best players in the competition. [Kendrick] Nunn, [Mathias] Lessort and Kostas Sloukas deserved it, and it's a vindication of their efforts, but also of the investment that has been made this season."

"I will dwell a little more on Kostas because his arrival changed our whole mindset. He brought us what we've been missing for the last few years. So, we built a team that eventually made it to the Final Four based on him," he pointed out.

Before Game 5 against Maccabi Playtika Tel Aviv, the Greens had to put tens of thousands of fans on hold because of the huge demand for tickets. Now that the Final Four is around the corner, Kontos admitted that Panathinaikos are going through "a state of asphyxiation."

"In the match against Maccabi, we had a waiting list that reached 97,000 persons. Now we have 30,000 applications and just 593 tickets to sell. Take into account that those tickets must be made available to the families of the players, to contractual obligations, sponsors, and season-ticket holders. That's barely enough to go round. We've found ourselves in a fortunate position - and unfortunately, we cannot enjoy it with our fans as we would like," Kontos said.

"Even if we had 20,000 tickets, we wouldn't have been able to make them available. And that's something the organizing authority needs to see from the new season," the PAO executive said. "There are websites on the market that give tickets and we are pushing in every direction to get as many as possible in our hands and make them available to our fans."

Like what we are doing? You can express your gratitude here.