SMSA gives new ticket system thumbs up after Pirates-Sundowns clash

Stadium Management South Africa (SMSA) MD Bertie Grobbelaar has revealed how it thwarted fraudulent ticketing operations on Sunday when Orlando Pirates beat Mamelodi Sundowns at FNB Stadium.

SMSA ditched Ticketpro for Open Tickets last month after uncovering alarming fraudulent ticketing activities at the previous Soweto derby at FNB Stadium on February 1.

The venue ended up accommodating more than 100,000 fans when only 87,000 tickets had been sold.

SMSA later said some fans had used fake tickets while others had bribed security personnel to gain entrance. The company that oversees FNB and Orlando Stadiums also revealed Ticketpro had used till slip tickets that could easily be counterfeited.

The Pirates-Downs fixture was the third — and biggest — game at the stadium to use the Open Tickets system since it was introduced.

“This game was a 100% improvement from the derby,” Grobbelaar told Sowetan on Monday.

“What contributed to that? The elimination of the till slip tickets is the first point.

“We had about 20,000 fake till slip tickets in the previous derby. More than 40% of tickets [for Sunday’s game] were purchased online and the rest [were] bought at outlets.

“We had a double scanning system at the scanning points [and] if your ticket did not scan as a valid ticket they referred you to verification points.

“It also helped that the stadium concluded a wi-fi activity agreement with Telkom and we extended that broadband connectivity to the scanning points. Normally we only had SAPS at the second scanning point but on Sunday they were at the first point and that also made a difference.”

Sundowns fan Pathu Ramabulana, 37, from Soshanguve, lauded the new ticketing system.

“I bought my ticket at Shoprite in the [Johannesburg] CBD,” he said. “I wish this system could also work at stadiums such as Lucas Moripe [in Atteridgeville, Pretoria] because sometimes there they don’t scan or they scan [only] once — here my ticket was double scanned.”

While there was no ticketing drama, chaos ensued in the stands when the announcer told fans sitting in the far stand — which is usually for the visiting team's supporters — to split from the centre line.

Grobbelaar distanced SMSA from the sitting arrangement chaos.

“Tickets are unreserved — there’s no stadium in South Africa where you purchase a ticket and sit on a [reserved] seat [in football matches]. It [the seating announcement] was just a club’s management of [its] supporters.”

The SMSA boss explained why Sundowns had to use a change room far from the regular ones, meaning a long walk through a passage system in the stadium, as documented in a video that has gone viral on social media. 

“We’ve got a contractual agreement with Chiefs on their change room. They’re the home tenant team and we renovated their change room into a state-of-the-art [facility], so that’s why it wasn’t used.”

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