Black market Champions League tickets on sale

Liverpool fans who travelled to Istanbul for tomorrow’s Champions League final against AC Milan were managing to pick up tickets on the black market today - though at a steep price.

Turks who were selling them were asking €1,000 a pair, supporters said - but fans were sometimes able to negotiate them down.

Fans Ray Duffey, 50, from Liverpool and Gerard McCarthy, 37, from Dublin, who works as a pub manager in Brussels, said they had managed to talk the vendor down to €800 for the pair.

“There are plenty about; it’s the Turks who are selling them, but really it’s more than we wanted to pay,” Mr Duffey said.

But he added: “It means we can relax now. We’re going to see the game. We think more tickets should be made available in the first place to the true fans. Liverpool’s allocation of 20,000 in a stadium of nearly 70,000 seems rather low.”

With the clock ticking down to tomorrow night’s kick-off, Liverpool fans filled a number of bars in the central area and belted out their favourite anthems, while locals gathered to watch, seeming amused at the spectacle, and police strolled around on floats or cruised by in cars.

Two people who were thought to have been arrested in the city centre early today may not have been, the British Consulate-General said.

The people called a Foreign Office helpline but were not actually taken into custody, and were looking forward to watching the match, a spokesman said.

British police concerns now centre on the Liverpool fans making their way to the match, in the Ataturk Olympic stadium about 30 miles from the city centre.

Fans were told they would need to set out in good time even with the late evening kick-off local time to negotiate what are bound to be congestion problems in the traffic-filled city.