Due to unprecedented demand, Ticketpass’ website crashed shortly after tickets were released on general sale at 8pm, Wednesday night. Demand peaked at over 30,000 page hits in a few seconds, which disappointingly, the Ticketpass servers were unable to cope with. We sincerely apologise for this. Given demand levels, all available tickets were in baskets within 4 minutes for those able to purchase.

For transparency, below is a timeline of last night’s events, received from Ticketpass:

19:59 6,000+ people had the event page loaded

20:00 Tickets become available for sale

20:01 Demand peaks at over 30,000 page hits in a few seconds

20:02 Event page starts slowing down

20:04 Event page crashes, stops taking new users showing them a blank page. All available tickets are now in baskets

20:05- 20:42 Server capacity increased by engineers and all tickets in baskets processed. 

Whilst the club were able to ensure season ticket holders had an exclusive window to purchase, we do recognise that we also have a lot of very regular supporters, who are not season ticket holders, who were unable to obtain a ticket. For this we sincerely apologise. Whilst this was a match where demand was always going to significantly exceed supply, we were simply dealing with unprecedented levels.

We would also like to provide clarity on the decision to restrict tickets to four per person. This decision was made to provide a balance between enabling families to purchase tickets whilst minimise the risk of ticket touts purchasing large quantities.

Clearly there are some important learnings that the club will take from this experience and ensure that the issues are not repeated as it is important to us that we try to protect the best interests of all of our regular supporters. This experience also demonstrates the need for an increase in our ground capacity for such high-profile matches, something which we know will be improved by the construction of the new North stand.