Seven days from the May 30 Champions League final at the Puskás Aréna, two ticket systems sit beside each other. UEFA's Resale Portal opened Wednesday May 20 for the 61,400-seat capacity match: face-value resale only, no seller fees, mobile tickets non-transferable, the buyer's registered phone required on matchday. [1] Arsenal received an allocation of 16,824 and PSG 17,200; official face value bands run from £60 in the Fans First section to £820 for Category 1. [1] On the secondary market, SeatPick listed 9,382 PSG-Arsenal tickets Saturday morning at a $2,764 floor and a $10,204 average; the platform's VIP section starts at $8,706. [2]

The paper's Friday brief on the eleven-thousand-dollar resale floor read UEFA's framework as the explicit anti-FIFA model — face-value mechanisms with no scalping cut, the structural counter-experiment to the 15% resale fee FIFA built into the World Cup pipeline. Saturday's tape is the verification: the resale floor crept up rather than down through the week, even with UEFA's portal open and explicitly redirecting fans toward face value. The Category 3 face-value seat at £180 is currently trading on a parallel surface at roughly $2,764 — fifteen times its UEFA price. [1][2]

Whether UEFA's portal absorbs the demand or the secondary spread holds is the operational question. Saturday's $2,764-$10,204 SeatPick band suggests it has not absorbed the demand yet. UEFA's experiment is live; the resale market is also live; both will close on the same Saturday night in Budapest.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London