Two tickets, one seat: fans locked out at Kosevo

The first of three announced Dino Merlin concerts at Sarajevo’s Kosevo stadium took place on the night of July 31, and what people carried home from it was not the setlist but the queue. Fans holding paid tickets never got in. From the street outside, while the singer was already on stage, came the chant “Dino, lopove”, or “Dino, you thief”.

Those left outside all say the same thing: more tickets were sold than the floor sections could hold. By their account, floor 1 and floor 2 filled up, and part of the audience with valid tickets was simply turned around and sent home. Nobody, they say, told them what to do with the tickets they had already paid for.

How did two tickets end up on one seat?

The complaint came with paper attached. One concertgoer produced two tickets bearing the same row and the same seat number, but different serial numbers. Both, he says, were bought through the seller Magaza.

“Here is our ticket and the ticket of the people who were already in our seats. Both we and they bought them at Magaza”

He also pointed out what is visible on the paper itself: the row and seat match, only the serial number differs. A duplicated numbered seat means two people paid for the same chair, and one of them had to go without it. In numbered sections that is not crowding, it is a records problem.

Three lanes for an entire stadium

The bottleneck started long before anyone reached a seat. Only three lanes were open at the entrance, the wait ran to roughly an hour, and tickets were scanned only at the stadium gates themselves. Lines broke apart, some of those gathered climbed over concrete barriers, and a few scaled the stadium structure trying to get inside.

Security checks, by the accounts of people on the spot, were minimal. One attendee said that in that crush a person could have carried in anything at all without being checked. Scanning at the gates rather than further out meant the crowd formed first and was verified second.

What happened on stage

Merlin came out while part of the audience was still trying to get through the gates, even though the officially announced start time was 8.30 p.m. The entrances were closed shortly afterwards. He spoke about his childhood and about the football matches once played at that stadium.

“Ovde na stadionu su se igrale velike utakmice…” (“Great matches were played here at this stadium…”)

At that point a section of the crowd began chanting “Dino, lopove”. The singer paused, lifted his cap to hear what was being shouted at him, then carried on with the planned set. The chanting continued outside the stadium too, among people who never reached the stage at all.

Silence from the promoter, and two more nights

The organisers had not said a word by the time this piece was published. Three questions remain unanswered:

• how many tickets were sold for floor 1 and floor 2
• whether capacity was exceeded, and by how much
• why only three lanes were opened at the entrance

The reason this matters is that it does not end with July 31. Two more concerts are scheduled at the same stadium, on August 1 and August 2. The people heading to Kosevo tonight hold tickets from the same sale, will pass through the same gates and, unless something changes, through the same number of lanes. Everything that went wrong on Thursday can repeat itself twice over, and the one party able to prevent it has stayed silent.

A single figure would settle this within the hour: the number of tickets sold per section. Until it appears, what is left on the table is two tickets with the same row and the same seat, and the people who paid for them and then watched the concert from the street.