Overcrowding and fake tickets in the Soweto Derby leads to new ticket vendor

The VOC commander was forced to open the gates on the days due to the overflow of spectators, with more than 20,000 believed to have turned up for a game that had sold out 87,000 tickets.

Grobbelaar says it’s always been a plan to introduce a new ticketing part, but the issues encountered in the recent derby have forced matters to be escalated.

"Let me be brutally honest with you today and for the first time disclose the numbers. All of us know that at the derby in an 87,000-capacity stadium, we had just in access of a 100 000 people inside the venue,” Grobbelaar said.

“How do we know that? Because from a venue perspective we installed a secondary counting system at the 10 stalls. In our discussions and in the debriefing, we said first of all as the venue authority, we've got an obligation towards the clubs to sort this and fortunately, we have two clubs making use of our venue that are not visitors to the venue but partners of us in the venue.

“We joined hands and we said collectively, we owe it to the fans, we owe it to the general public at large, we owe to our sponsors, we owe it to the PSL to ensure that we put measures in place to mitigate this.

“So, it is a strange time to do so specifically with big fixtures coming up but we made a decision to accelerate the ticketing system at the venues we manage. With that I refer to FNB Stadium and Orlando Stadium with immediate effect.

“So, from the 1st of March we will have a new ticketing partner and a new ticketing system and a new ticketing purchase options."

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Grobbelaar says in the meetings that followed after the game played on the first day of this month, they identified fake tickets, scans that were not working and bribery of security as one of the biggest causes of overcrowding problems in this game.

"We identified mainly two issues that contributed towards the problems we've had. One, was fraudulent tickets and I'll get to that point now. The second point was scanning issues at the entry points and coupled with the scanning issues,” he added.

“There was the issue of human error on scanning staff and security personnel and in some instances, these people working together, taking bribes to let people in."