FC Basel halt ticket sales due to unprecedented demand over friendly vs Barcelona | OneFootball

It has been a rather queer pre-season for Barcelona ahead of the 2026-27 campaign, and a number of factors have played a part.

For starters, the team’s results so far in the preparatory games have been far from impressive as the team has not won a single game convincingly. That again may well be down to numerous regular starters being unavailable early in pre-season.

In addition, however, the team’s pre-season fixtures themselves have been largely unstable so far, even forcing cancellation of games.

First, it was Barcelona’s game against Preston North End which was cancelled owing to injuries in the opposition team, and more recently the club saw the game against Ittihad Tanger scheduled for 15th August in Morocco cancelled.

In the second case, the cancellation was down to the security and migration crisis between Morocco and Ceuta.

A third problem

With the clash in Tangier cancelled, Barcelona immediately found a replacement clash in Basel for Sunday. FC Basel agreed to host the club for a friendly fixture, and the game is set to take place at the St. Jakob Park.

The pre-season has been tricky so far. (Photo by Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

Now, as reported by SPORT, Barcelona’s visit to Basel has generated such enormous interest in Basel that the Swiss team’s ticketing servers are simply unable to handle the overload.

Given the situation, the club had to take a drastic decision and announced earlier today that they are temporarily stopping public ticket sales. 

They explained that their servers were unable to handle the traffic and that hundreds of millions of clicks had been recorded.

They attempted to restore the servers in the afternoon, but the measures were simply not enough. Now, the servers will remain closed and will prepare to reopen ticket sales on Tuesday at 12:00PM. 

Game is still on

Despite all the trouble with the online ticket sales, it can only be seen as a positive that Barcelona’s arrival is being greeted with such interest. The pre-season friendly, in that sense, will be a grand success.

The big names should be back for the game at the weekend. (Photo by Eric Alonso/Getty Images)

Hansi Flick will have most first-team regulars available for the game on Sunday as the entire team is expected back in training this week.

In that sense, it will be a special match in Basel and could well be the night Barcelona fans get to see the big names and World Cup winners in action once more.