Ticket for Dzeko's Zenica Farewell Hits 1,000 Marks

Tickets for Edin Dzeko’s final appearance in the Bosnia and Herzegovina jersey sold out in just 14 minutes, and within hours resale listings on classified sites and Facebook groups were offering them at ten, even sixteen times the official price. For Serbian fans, who watched Dzeko for decades as one of the region’s most recognizable players in the shirts of Wolfsburg, Manchester City and Inter, this is the last chance to see him play for his country, which is part of why the scramble for seats at Bilino Polje is being followed well beyond Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The match is set for October 2 at Bilino Polje stadium in Zenica, against Sweden, in the third round of the Nations League. According to the Football Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (N/FSBiH), it will be the last time the 39-year-old striker wears the jersey of the “Dragons.” The stadium holds around 11,000 seats, and the federation received close to half a million ticket requests, local media reported, thousands of times more than the number of available seats.

Official prices vs. the black market

The football federation put tickets on sale at the following prices:

• North and south stands: 40 KM
• East stand: 50 KM
• West stand: 60 KM

On classified sites and in Facebook resale groups, those prices jumped several times over within hours:

• North and south stands: 150 to 200 KM
• East stand: over 200 KM
• West stand: 200 to 500 KM, with at least one listing asking as much as 500 euros, or roughly 978 KM

That last figure means a scalper is asking about sixteen times the official price for a ticket that originally cost 60 marks. Both outlets that reported the story, index.ba and Zenicablog, cite the same 500-euro offer for a west-stand seat, while other resale prices vary depending on the listing and when it was posted, according to the reports.

Tickets are not only changing hands through classified sites. Part of the resale wave surfaced in Facebook groups dedicated to selling tickets, where scalpers listed large numbers of seats for sale, at several times the official price, as soon as the stadium sold out.

Whether a resold ticket will even work

Before the official sale began, the Football Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina announced that a ticket would be valid only if it carried the holder’s first and last name, and that ID would be checked alongside the ticket at the Bilino Polje gates. In practice, that means a buyer who pays a scalper several hundred marks is not guaranteed entry if the name on the ticket does not match the ID shown at the gate. How strictly that check will be enforced, and how many people end up stuck outside the stadium despite holding a paid ticket, will depend on how matchday itself is organized.

A career ending in Zenica

Dzeko made his debut for the Bosnia and Herzegovina senior national team in 2007 and has since played 151 matches, scoring 73 goals, which places him among the most prolific scorers in the country’s football history. The match against Sweden, part of the Nations League group stage, will be the last chance for fans in the stands to see that combination of the number nine and the national jersey, and that fact, more than the result of the match itself, explains why demand for seats at Bilino Polje outstripped both the stadium’s capacity and the federation’s real ability to meet it.