Barcelona pre-season trip faces fresh disruption after Basel ticketing collapse

Barcelona’s preparations for the new season have been hit by a further setback after Basel temporarily suspended general ticket sales for Sunday’s friendly at St. Jakob-Park because demand overwhelmed the Swiss club’s online systems.

The match remains scheduled to take place, with Barcelona still committed to travelling to Basel next Sunday. However, the ticketing problem has created another complication during a pre-season period that has already seen a series of unexpected incidents for the Catalan club.

Basel announced on Monday that it had halted the public sale of tickets for the fixture. The club said its servers had been unable to cope with the exceptional volume of requests received in recent hours.

According to a statement released by Basel, repeated attempts by supporters to refresh the ticketing page generated requests to the club’s servers running into the hundreds of millions.

The Swiss club said it had tried during the afternoon to increase the capacity of its systems gradually, hoping to resume sales. Those measures, however, were not sufficient to deal with the scale of demand.

Basel has therefore decided to stop the sale temporarily while it prepares to relaunch the process with greater technical resources and capacity. Ticket sales are due to resume on Tuesday.

The club said tickets would be available exclusively through its online platform. It also warned supporters that it would not be able to process requests submitted by telephone, email, social media or any other channel.

The latest issue follows two earlier disruptions to Barcelona’s summer schedule.

During the club’s training camp in England, Barcelona were forced to cancel a friendly against Preston North End after the English side proposed playing with its reserve players because of the large number of absentees in its squad.

A second setback came several days later when a friendly scheduled to be played in Morocco on 15 August was also called off.

Barcelona then had to find an alternative opponent at short notice and arranged to face Basel, their new opponents for the fixture next Sunday.

The scale of the interest in Barcelona’s visit to St. Jakob-Park has now created a problem of its own. The attention generated by the match exceeded the capacity of Basel’s ticketing system, leaving the club with little choice but to suspend the general sale.

The newspaper Sport reported that a further problem connected with the Basel friendly had emerged just as Barcelona’s fixture list appeared to be returning to normal.

For now, the disruption is limited to ticket sales rather than the match itself. Barcelona continue to maintain their plans to visit St. Jakob-Park on Sunday, despite the difficulties that have accumulated during their preparations for the new campaign.