Last night Club played the 1/8th final of the Champions League in a nearly sold-out Jan Breydel. A historic evening for Blauw-Zwart.
In the run-up to this match, Club took strict measures in terms of ticket sales. The sale took place in three phases. First, as always, all existing subscribers were given priority. After the priority period for own subscribers, only Club ID holders were given the chance to buy a ticket. In a final phase, tickets were also sold to people without Club ID but only to supporters who already had an account on our website from before the draw or to supporters who already bought tickets in the past. IP addresses from Portugal were blocked on our ticketing site during the entire sales period. Through certain technological detours, 600 Benfica fans with a Portuguese home address or email address still managed to buy tickets, these tickets were immediately canceled and refunded.
Despite all these measures, Benfica supporters turned out to be present in the Bruges boxes. The investigation into how this could have happened is ongoing in cooperation with the police. During the match, our stewards reacted very quickly by gathering all Benfica fans in two adjacent boxes next to the away box. As a result, everything remained relatively calm during the match. After the match there were skirmishes with individual fans.
We understand that this was a very unpleasant experience for our own fans and will, together with the police, make every effort to avoid this in the future.