UEFA to give Northern Ireland fans more Euro 2016 tickets following loyalty scheme complaints

It looks like the loyalty scheme drawn up by the Irish Football Association failed due a computer error.

The IFA introduced a points-based system to ensure fans who went to as many games as possible, home and away, would get higher priority applying for tickets for Euro 2016. However, the system proved to be a complete disaster as some fans who had upwards of 27 points out of a possible 29 failed to get their hands on any of the 29,000 tickets the IFA received for the tournament’s group games against Poland, Ukraine and Germany. Meanwhile some fans who had zero points managed to secure tickets. IFA chief executive Patrick Nelson claimed that UEFA has allocated 93 more tickets for the Germany game as well as an extra 505 tickets for the Ukraine match as a result of the complaints, the BBC reports. This is on top of the extra 1,276 tickets announced last week for the Poland clash. Nelson explained that "some of them are going to be more expensive but some are going to be cheaper as well". He also shed some light on what exactly went wrong with the points system revealing that a "quite a small, inadvertent error by UEFA" meant people "well in excess of 17 points" did not get tickets. He added that once the problem had been noticed they contacted UEFA "at the highest level" and "within three hours agreed to supply enough tickets to address the immediate matter".