S'pore football head coach Gavin Lee & Irfan Fandi support anti-scalping campaign after S'pore vs Thailand ticket resales

Singapore national football team head coach Gavin Lee and Lions defender Irfan Fandi have publicly expressed their support for a campaign condemning ticket scalping on Instagram.

This comes after many fans were unable to secure tickets for Singapore's Asean Championship semi-final against Thailand at Jalan Besar Stadium.

More than 4,000 home-supporter tickets were released for sale on Aug. 12, but were snapped up within minutes amid overwhelming demand.

Shortly afterwards, tickets began appearing on Carousell, with some sellers asking as much as S$1,500 for a pair of Category 1 tickets.

This is around 15 times the original price of S$49 each, and a S$3.49 booking fee.

In response, Singa Brigade, the Lions' official supporters' group, posted a message on their social media pages under the hashtag #SAYNOTOSCALPERS.

The group said ticket scalping deprived "diehard, loyal and genuine fans" of the opportunity to support the national team, adding that supporting Singapore was "more than just watching a game".

They also urged the public to report ticket resellers.

The post read:

"As fellow fans of Singapore, we wanna bring a message.

After seeing scalpers selling tickets, we feel that this is simply not right.

It takes away the chance for diehard fans, loyal fans, & genuine fans who just want to watch their team play.

For us, supporting Singapore is more than just watching a game.

It's about pride, passion and standing behind our team.

So we call upon everyone to help mass report these resellers.

We hope this serves as a learning lesson to all scalpers out there!

SAY NO TO SCALPERS. LET THE REAL FANS BE THERE."

Lee and Irfan later reshared the post on their Instagram Stories in a show of support.

Frustration over the ticketing process

A Mothership reader previously shared that she had been on the website from 10:45am that morning to snag tickets.

After joining a virtual queue, she had to wait again until around 11:20am when she finally entered the page to select her seats.

Although ticket sections would occasionally become available, they would disappear almost immediately when she tried to select them.

She likened the experience to "playing whack-a-mole", a sentiment echoed by several other fans on Instagram.

Despite spending another 40 minutes trying to secure seats, she was unsuccessful.

By 11:45am, the platform displayed a message stating that all seats were "currently reserved by customers completing their purchases".