EuroLeague Final Four tickets: where to buy & how not to get scammed? / News - Basketnews.com

EuroLeague's Fan-to-Fan Marketplace is the only official way to purchase tickets for the Final Four in Kaunas. Reselling on other platforms is illegal, fans make purchases at their own risk.

Credit: AS Monaco, Barca/Twitter, Francesco Richieri & Panagiotis Moschandreou/GettyImages | BasketNews Illustration Credit AS Monaco, Barca/Twitter, Francesco Richieri & Panagiotis Moschandreou/GettyImages | BasketNews Illustration

Counting down the last days until the EuroLeague Final Four 2023 in Kaunas, European fans are hunting for tickets to the top-notch basketball event that will be held this weekend.

The activity to get tickets has been recorded after all four Final Four participants were revealed. Demand growth is expected this week.

The EuroLeague has established the Fan-to-Fan Marketplace as the sole official platform for purchasing tickets. This resale platform, facilitated by the official distributor Bilietai.lt, ensures a secure and authorized process for obtaining tickets to the event in Kaunas.

The ticket holder can use the resale function through his account, and EuroLeague is also involved in the entire process. The latter is engaged in the verification of authenticity, after which the confirmed valid ticket enters the market.

A new code is generated for the ticket so that the original holder can no longer use the resold ticket.

Fans are constantly browsing the platform, still hoping to get the chance to enter the Zalgirio Arena on May 19-21.

"When the participants of the Final Four were revealed, a considerable amount of tickets were immediately put on the platform," Simonas Sudaras, commercial director of Bilietai.lt, told BasketNews. "How long a ticket remains unpurchased depends on the price. The cheaper ones probably stay for minutes, while the more expensive ones last longer, even two days. Basically, everything happens on the same day -- a new ticket appears on the market and is resold."

The first EuroLeague semifinal will be played on Friday at 17:00 CEST when regular-season winners Olympiacos Piraeus meet AS Monaco. The second semifinal involves El Clasico between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid, which takes place the same day at 20:00 CEST.

The finals will take place on Sunday. A game for the third place starts at 16:00 CEST, while the grand final is scheduled for 19:00 CEST.

Official ticket prices in the stands range from 225 to 1,450 euros. Courtside seats -- from 2,150 to 4,650 euros.

On the official platform, resellers are not able to profit from transferring their tickets. Furthermore, tickets cannot be separated for individual games (days); instead, purchased packages are resold as a whole.

It's not uncommon for individuals to attempt selling Final Four tickets through other channels such as social media and ad platforms. Unauthorized sellers expect to make money by raising the ticket price.

However, it is not a legal practice, and those, who buy unofficially, can be left outside the arena door and lose money.

"Other platforms are not legal for resale," Sudaras underlined. "If a person takes the risk of not getting to the event for big money, that is his choice. I really don't recommend doing such things especially when this convenient solution is created and there is no speculation.

"A person who buys a resale ticket on the official platform does not experience an artificially inflated price, which can be the case on other platforms. In them, everything sometimes seems legit, and the person is reliable, but you find out everything at the arena entrance."

Credit D.Lukšta

Is it possible to find justice after falling into the traps of fraudsters?

"Actually, not much, because the organizer has banned the illegal resale of tickets," Sudaras said. "When you arrive at the venue and find out that the ticket is not valid, the most common answer is 'contact the place or person whom you bought it from.' I don't think other platforms will help you, because the person, who bought the ticket, is responsible for all that."

People make requests to the official ticket distributor to check if the ticket is valid, but such a service is not provided for the same reason -- reselling on other platforms is illegal.

The idea of official resale was provided by the EuroLeague. Such a decision is rare in the Baltic countries, but it has worked.

"This was one of the EuroLeague requirements. They provided almost 60 pages of documentation. It was definitely not an easy distribution (smiles). There are quite a lot of requirements that we have met, from the individual ticket layout to the individual double control that will be at the venue."

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