Jurgen Klopp has backed Liverpool fans’ condemnation of the Champions League final pricing structure.
Spirit of Shankly issued an open letter to UEFA ahead of their side’s May 28 showdown against Real Madrid to protest the eye-watering ticket prices.
The cheapest tickets for Reds’ fans will cost between £50.32 and £125.79 while the higher end of the scale are upward of £400 and £500 respectively.
Both Liverpool and Madrid have received just 19,618 tickets apiece for the Stade de France, which will see its capacity reduced to 75,000 for the final.
Remaining tickets are set to be allocated via a public ballot and to what UEFA terms as the ‘football family’ in addition to its own corporate sponsors.
But Klopp believes criticisms of European football’s governing body are justified after increasing its ticketing revenues by around 38% since 2018.
He said: “In a few months we have a World Cup in Qatar. Nobody speaks about that anymore. How that could have happened?
“Nobody who made the decision [at FIFA] that time, I think, is still in charge but the World Cup is still there. It’s about money, that’s how it is.
“UEFA are not the saints of football. They never were.
“What they have is a fantastic, fantastic product with the Champions League. If you would have asked me, we never had to change that.
“But they lost here and there a little bit of money, and the easy way to get it back is to increase the ticket prices. That’s how life is. That’s the world we are living in.
“We cannot say, ‘These are the bad guys’. Opportunity makes bad guys and in this case, one of the biggest games ever, they will not gift the tickets.
“So we will not change that now here, with whatever we say.
“I understand 100,000% where Spirit of Shankly is coming from. It’s absolutely not right but it happens everywhere, and it doesn’t make it better.
“Just in this specific case to not only pay 38% more than last time for a ticket, to get only 50% of the tickets and the rest go to people who pay thousands and thousands for the tickets. That’s how the money is made.
“The atmosphere, only 20,000 Reds are responsible for that.
“Do I like it? No. Will I change it? I can’t see it. To talk about is right. But you have to write about it too because most of us think the same.”