As Kenyans scrambled to buy tickets for Harambee Stars’ final Chan 2024 Group ‘A’ match against Zambia scheduled for Sunday, August 17, at the Moi International Sports Centre, Kasarani, Nation Sport has established that only about 13,500 tickets out of 27,000 were available for Kenyans to purchase online through the CAF recommended online ticketing platform chan.mookh.com.

This is as exclusively revealed to Nation Sport by the Chan 2024 Local Organising Committee Chairman Nicholas Musonye, and corroborated by Jecton Obure, the Chan 2024 Ticketing Coordinator, and Mookh staff who sought anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Mookh is the company authorised by CAF to sell tickets for all Chan 2024 matches played in Kenya and Uganda. Kenya and Uganda are co-hosting Chan 2024 with Tanzania.

“In any game, the agreement between the LOC and CAF was that half the tickets are reserved for purchase by fans, which include fans of Harambee Stars, neutrals, and supporters of Kenya’s opponents. For the Kenya and Morocco game, the stadium capacity was 48,000, so about 24,000 tickets were available for purchase,” Musonye stated.

Curiously, according to Obure, the number of tickets that were scanned at the entry points at Kasarani on Sunday during Kenya’s match against Morocco were 25,000. “But the stadium was filled beyond its capacity. However, we estimated that about 75,000 people entered the stadium,” Obure said.

Concurring with Obure’s estimate for the attendance of the Kenya versus Morocco match, our source at Mookh expressed concern that Kasarani may be filled beyond its capacity on Sunday when Harambee Stars play Zambia unless “the government and the police find a way of dealing with over 70,000 fans”.

During Kenya’s match against Morocco, fans with tickets and those without overran security personnel at Kasarani, an action that saw CAF ordering Mookh to suspend ticket sales for Harambee Stars’ subsequent match against Zambia. CAF also wrote to Musonye on Monday, instructing him and the LOC to restrict ticket sales for the Zambia vs Kenya match to 27,000 tickets, down from 48,000, representing 60 per cent of Kasarani’s capacity.

Following that directive from CAF, tickets for the Zambia vs Kenya match went up for sale in the wee hours of Tuesday morning and were sold out before daybreak.

“Ticket sales for that match started at 3am, and by 5am the game was sold out,” said Obure. A Mookh employee corroborating Obure’s statement said that tickets went on sale online at 10:30 pm on Monday. “When I checked the portal at 6am on Tuesday, only 500 tickets were remaining, but they were gone by 7am,” the Mookh employee said.

After CAF wrote to Musonye on Monday, the LOC chairman called a press conference on Tuesday morning at the Nyayo National Stadium, where they declared that no physical tickets would be used to enter Kasarani on Sunday.

“Only e-tickets will be scanned at the gates,” Musonye thundered at the press conference.

“The tickets for the game against Zambia, for example, were meant to go on sale on Sunday, August 10. But after fans overran security in the game against Morocco, we had to put measures in place. We either had to forfeit our matches and have them moved to another venue, or have the match played without full capacity. The CAF directed us to allow only 60 per cent of the tickets. That is what we worked with,” said Musonye.

His declaration comes after widespread expression of wonder about the source of physical tickets, yet Mookh was not providing them.

It has emerged that the sale of physical tickets was prohibited from the outset, yet some people were selling or buying physical tickets.

“We were not supposed to provide any physical tickets. CAF only requested advance electronic tickets, and that is what we gave them,” said our source at Mookh.

“What has been happening is that some people have been buying valid tickets in bulk and then printing them after scanning the QR code. After that, they sell the print-outs at a higher price,” our source at Mookh added.

Musonye corroborated the Mookh employee’s statement, but explained that the physical tickets that some politicians, including Korogocho MCA Absalom Odhiambo, were parading on social media might have been part of the complementary tickets that were printed at the LOC level.

“What happened is that we bought the complementary tickets and printed them out, but there were a bit too many. Those are the ones some politicians might have been giving out,” he said.

At the stadium during the Kenya vs Morocco game, ticket touts were selling printed tickets for as much as Sh2,000.

However, some printed tickets had duplicated QR Codes. For individuals with such tickets, only those who had their ticket scanned first could enter the stadium, leaving the rest holding “valid tickets” but unable to access the stadium.

According to Mookh, a customer is allowed to buy only five tickets at a time. However, there are no restrictions on how many times the same client can purchase more batches of five tickets. “This is something we are trying to implement going forward,” said our source at Mookh.

Staff at Mookh also lamented about police laxity, saying that when they reported the matter to the police, they received bribes and turned a blind eye as the illegal sale of tickets continued.

“We even alerted the police when we saw the people selling tickets at the stadium. But they confront the ticket touts and turn a blind eye after receiving a bribe of Sh200. So what do we do?” our source pondered.

It is not unusual for football governing bodies organising big tournaments or competition finals to put up only a fraction of the tickets up for sale. However, the standard practice is that they declare the number of tickets that will be available for fans to purchase.

For instance, before the 2025 Uefa Champions League, which was played at the 75,000-capacity stadium Allianz Arena in Munich, Germany, Uefa announced that 38,700 tickets out of 64,500 were available for fans to purchase.

Out of those 38,700 tickets, the two teams that reached the final, Inter Milan of Italy and France’s Paris Saint-Germain, received 18,000 tickets each. The remaining 1,700 tickets, Uefa announced, were offered for sale to football fans worldwide through their ticketing portal.

Unfortunately, such transparency on ticket allocation has been lacking from CAF and the Chan 2024 Local Organising Committee, leaving genuine fans frustrated at not being given a fair chance to purchase tickets for Harambee Stars matches.