In February 2024, Lionel Messi will set foot in Hong Kong (China) to attend a tour in this land. Before he appeared, a fever had come when 2 million people lined up online waiting to buy tickets to watch him compete.It was a friendly match between Inter Miami and Hong Kong XI (a team of stars from the Hong Kong National Championship). This competition took place on February 4 at Hong Kong Stadium, which has a capacity of 40,000 seats. In addition to Messi, Inter Miami also brought Jordi Alba and Sergio Busquets to compete.
With the above stars, it is not surprising that Asian fans, not only Hong Kong (China) but also Japan, China, Korea… are searching for tickets to the stadium to watch their idols play. That is shown by the fact that there were 2 million ticket orders on the opening day (December 15) and after less than 1 hour, all 40,000 tickets were sold out even though the price was not cheap, from 110 to 625 USD/ticket depending on the area of the stands. On average, out of 50 people, only 1 person is a successful buyer.
On social networks, many fans lamented not being able to get tickets. Many people were even very close to getting tickets but failed to pay due to network overload and access congestion.
The president of Tatler Asia, the company that organized the match, shared this: “We are really delighted with the response from the fans. Some social media users have published photos showing the system being overloaded with traffic. But the need is so great and we have tried our best.”
With the current situation, it seems that many enthusiastic Messi fans will have to go to the black market and pay a price much higher than the listed price to be able to witness their idol. When Messi appeared in Beijing, China last June, many tickets were traded for hundreds of millions of dong, dozens of times more than the original tickets.
This scenario can completely repeat itself, especially when the Cong Nhan stadium in Beijing has a capacity one and a half times that of Hong Kong stadium, meaning the number of tickets issued will be less than the event in June 2023.
In addition to the match with Hong Kong, Inter Miami will stay in Asia to play friendlies with Al Hilal and Al Nassr. And certainly, fans will still be crazy about Messi, especially his Inter Miami match against Ronaldo’s Al Nassr.
