GELSENKIRCHEN – All available tickets for the home leg of Schalke’s Champions League semi-final against Manchester United on April 26 sold out in just two and a half hours on Thursday. A sell-out crowd of 54,000 is expected, with some 2,500 tickets already allocated to United for their fans.
The return leg takes place at Old Trafford on May 4. Schalke have 30,000 season-ticket holders, who also have to apply for European matches, and when tickets went on sale at 1100am on Thursday (1000BST), the fans took just 150 minutes to snap them up. An estimated 8.79 million viewers in Germany tuned into watch Schalke beat Inter at home, which represented 29.6 percent of the viewing market.
It was the highest television audience in Germany for a football match — apart from the 2010 World Cup — since 11.89 million viewers watched Bayern Munich lose 2-0 to Inter Milan in last season’s Champions League final.
