On our way: A Bilbao odyssey

What does it take for a fan to get to a European final? This is the story of my trip to the Europa League Final 2025 and an effort to shed light on what's involved. The first of a two-parter…

On our way, we’re on our way,

To Bilbao, we’re on our way,

How we get there I don’t care,

How we get there I don’t know,

All I know is Tottenham’s on their way

Reaching a major European football final is a cause for joy. But few outside the hard core of committed fans who follow their teams across the continent realise the logistical and financial challenges that face fans who want to be present when their team plays that final game and hopefully lifts the trophy.

The verse above, taken up by Spurs fans as the knockout rounds of the Europa League progressed, is a pretty accurate summation. If your team wins, it is of course all worth it. If they lose, well, you had to be there anyway. It’s our choice of whether or not to go, and while some of what follows will question if certain aspects really do need to be as they are – I’ve written about the reality of following your club in Europe before – it’s worth establishing from the off that this is something we do for pleasure and it is great to be lucky enough to be able to go to the game.

This, then, is an account of a journey to a final, an insight into the practicalities of following a team around Europe. The focus is on the financial and cultural issues covered regularly here, and I apologise if it’s a little Spurs heavy for some. Other stories are available – this is mine.

While live men’s football is a huge draw – the Premier League estimates total attendance over the course of a season is around 14.8 million people – the number of fans who regularly travel to away games is far smaller. There are no more than around 3,000 away tickets available for any game in the Premier League, so demand hugely outstrips supply. Many clubs run loyalty schemes which mean the more games you go to, the more chance you have of getting a ticket, and that in turn means each club’s 3,000 away fans will be largely the same people from week to week.

Tickets are still passed on – a major part of football culture in in England – but that tradition is under pressure because of the huge demand. Understandably, fans on loyalty schemes don’t like losing out because someone ahead of them in the queue has passed their ticket to a mate or a family member. But I’d estimate that there are no more than around 4,000 to 5,000 people who go regularly to away games at each club.

European away games are tougher still to get tickets for. There are significant time and cost demands, and competing clubs are obliged to offer 5% of tickets, rather than the 10% or 3,000 required by the Premier League. Combine that with grounds that, in the Europa and Europa Conference Leagues, can have relatively small capacities and sometimes there will be less than 1,000 tickets on offer.

So, I reckon it’s safe to estimate that between 2,000 and 2,500 fans at most can be considered regular attenders at European away games. Across the seven English clubs that were in European competition this season, that’s under 18,000 people. Compare that number with the total attendance across European competition games (17 million League in 2023-24) and then with the total TV audience for the same season quoted by UEFA as 1.6 billion for the Champions League and 654 million for the Europa and Europa Conference Leagues and you’ll understand why what happens to away fans in Europe is low down the list of priorities. It’s a numbers game.

Bilbao Airport gives the first impression of a special place

Finals are different. In Bilbao, it’s estimated 37,000 Spurs fans checked in to the fan park at various stages throughout the day of the Final. Many thousands more stayed in other parts of the city and, given what I witnessed, I don’t think an estimate of over 50,000 Spurs fans is excessive. United fans seemed heavily outnumbered, but like Spurs they would have had an allocation of c14,700. The San Mames is a 49,600 capacity stadium, and the remaining c20,200 tickets were made up of 11,000 public ballot tickets and c9,000 for what UEFA calls the football family. Many of those would have found their way to fans at vastly inflated prices. Face value prices, though, were very good, with around half the tickets available in the bottom two price tiers of €40 and €65, with the cost of tickets in the top two tiers rising sharply to €160 and €240.

For regular travellers, it’s almost like a job to do the planning required to get to games. Especially so now that more games means shorter turnaround times between ties. For the many more who don’t or can’t travel as regularly, the level of organisation required can be a major challenge.

Booking for the league phase can be easier as the eight games span from September to January, meaning slightly more time to plan for the later matches. I’m in the top 1,000 loyalty point holders at Spurs, so I know I’m pretty certain of a match ticket at most grounds. That means I can plan in the certainty I can get into the game. I just need to get to where the game is.

Booking.com is a godsend, as you can book accommodation that can be cancelled with a bit of notice, so once destinations are known it’s possible to secure rooms. This needs time and organisation though. UEFA draws now identify league phase home and away opponents and the dates of matches, but there is no advance notice of the order of those games, so you can’t book anything until the schedule is locked in. Nonetheless, researching possible routes to possible destinations is advisable, so that you can move quickly when dates are announced.

This season, we were driving to an away game in Newcastle on the day UEFA was confirming the schedule. We built in a couple of service station stops where we could get on the Wi-Fi and book hotels and flights. The announcement arrived six hours later than expected, leading to a stressful drive. We managed to book that evening, but prices were already rising steeply.

Moving fast is key because rooms and flight prices shoot up sharply once dates are confirmed. That’s the dynamic pricing model so beloved of promotion companies and which many club owners want to introduce for football tickets. It is pure exploitation and hopefully the new regulator will see that it is not introduced for match ticketing.

It’s when it gets to the knockout stages that the fun really starts. Alkmaar was easy enough to get to, and a lovely place, but at the end of the second leg tie at home against AZ we were set hovering over our phone screens ready to book flights to Frankfurt for the next round in the final minutes, arguing about whether a one-goal lead was enough to be sure we’d be travelling, and fretting that the stadium Wi-Fi would go down. We hit the buy button on the whistle. An hour after the game prices had doubled. Some people were already taking a chance on booking for Bilbao.

Beating Frankfurt gave us a tie against Bodo/Glimt, situated a 17.5-hour drive north of Oslo inside the Arctic Circle. It’s the kind of trip fans love, to somewhere we’d never think of going unless it was for the football, and this promised to be something very different from the normal trips. But with only 404 tickets available, the trip costing at least £1,000 and requiring a minimum two days off – plus some challenging weather conditions thrown in – this was a bridge too far even for many of us seasoned travellers.

Joy at victory in Norway quickly gave way to the madness of getting to Bilbao for the final – which was being held just 13 days later. We’d booked accommodation back in the summer, but even then only in Santander, a one-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Bilbao.

It took most of a day to research, plan and book what was to be our route to the final. You need to be smart, but not too clever by half and end up paying more for a circuitous trip intended to save money that ends up costing you more than a direct route. Bilbao is not the easiest place to get to, and options from the major European hub airports were fewer than they had been for Madrid in 2019. Flights that were available were already very expensive; trains across northern Spain don’t have the best reputation, and going that route involved multiple changes and long hours of travel. Ferries were 36 hours each way, rising in price, and only sailing at limited times. The prospect of a punishing drive, or an even more punishing coach journey – £99 on Flixbus from Victoria – was looming.

The Club and specialist operator Sport Options chartered flights but they were between £800 and £1,200 for a day trip or a two-night stay in a neighbouring city. We found a flight that took us from Naples to Bilbao on Tuesday morning for €33 (£27.68) per person. London to Naples on Monday afternoon we got for £47 per person via Jet2. Accommodation near the airport was £30 per person for one night, cancellable via Booking.com. From Bilbao, we booked a bus which would take one and a half hours to get to Santander. We’d stay there on Tuesday night, £35 a head, then get the bus – booked in advance – back into Bilbao for match day. So we could get there, we just needed to get back.

Flights back to the UK were still expensive through until Saturday, when Vueling offered a trip for £59 a head. We’d have to make a week of it! Hotel prices dropped significantly in the days after the final, so we booked up at around £60 a head per night for the Thursday and Friday, which would give us time to take in the sights of Bilbao, including the famous Guggenheim museum. Just one remaining issue – we had to get back to Santander on the night of the game.

It turned out every bus was booked until 6:45am the morning after the final. So we got tickets for the all-night party at the night club hired by the group of fans who were organising the boat trips we’d booked for the afternoon of the game. Needs must, and who needs sleep when you’re in a European final? We’d get the bus back to Santander, grab a few hours sleep at the hotel, check out by midday and head back into Bilbao. It would be a five-and-a-half day trip with just one day not travelling, costing just under £500 a head (including bus fares).

A week after the tension of arranging travel came the tension of getting a ticket. At Spurs, we had to apply first via the club. The top c14,700 applicants would get a code enabling us to access the UEFA ticket site, which was the only platform tickets were being sold through. Once in, you could select a ticket in one of four price categories, and if successful would be sent your ticket a couple of days later. Then, on the day of the game, you’d be sent a QR code that activated your ticket. The process worked, although not without a scare when we were unable to log in to our UEFA accounts when the sales window opened. Luckily we had two of us trying, as I’m still waiting for my password reset email!

• Part two, published tomorrow, covers arrival in Bilbao, how the final was organised, and why all this can mean so much.

  Photos: © Martin Cloake