By Anita Rannoba
Despite Botswana Premier League football teams largely depending on gate takings to survive, the issue of ticketing remains unresolved.
With recent evidence of the type of ticketing the teams have been employing from very old tickets of passed games to using receipts, it is a clear is horribly going wrong
Supporters do not only bring vibe in the game but they also help teams to generate income through gate taking. Even so certain teams have indicated that fans are also to blame for the lack of purchasing proper tickets.
Willoughby Kemoeng, the public relations officer for Extension Gunners noted that supporters are partly to blame for the lack of proper ticking.
Speaking on account of what he saw his team supporters do, said tickets are very expensive for them to purchase and that they noticed that one ticket can be sold for 10 different people at the stadium while others prefer to jump into the stadium leading to loss of income.
“It takes P15000.00 to print 3000 tickets. With the recent attitude that supporters never attend games and that we cannot rotate the compu-tickets it is a challenge to order. This is the basic way for now or we can resort to tags. Period,” said a frustrated Willoughby.
Highlighting that they we unaware that receipts were being used as tickets, the spokesperson said they only got to learn by it from a picture that was circulating in social media.
Yet again he noted that it was still fine as they could read and take note of how much was made unlike using cash. He said tickets are a luxury and they do not have that kind of money to invest in luxury tickets.
“We may not have been notified of the receipts but they are ordinary, authentic and real and they can be countered for. The branch that we left to handle ticketing thought they were making things easy and they did a good job,” he said.
“Tickets are not working for us Batswana, no matter how hard we try. Be it BPL management, technical team and even supporters. E-ticking would have worked for us security wise and for accountability but apart from that I practically do not see it solving our ticketing problem.
There are always network problems at Choppies. Our supporters fail to follow instructions to buy tickets at shops but rather prefer getting them at stadiums on the day and time of kick off. We surely need a miracle to solve this,” an anonymous source said.
Highlighting that maybe ticketing should be taken back to the hands of BPL it was better when they were issuing tickets. The Botswana Football Association (BFA) officials and those of the Botswana Premier League (BPL) were unreachable for comment on this matter.
