With their paths through the semifinals now complete, fans of Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain can finally start preparing themselves for the 2025-26 Champions League final.
For supporters, getting everything sorted for the final on May 30 will be a chaotic experience. But amid the flurry of flight bookings and last-minute hotel reservations, traveling fans might do well to take a moment to double-check their itinerary and make sure they aim for the right city.
Think we’re joking? It has happened plenty of times before in European football, and the host city of this season’s Champions League final has been the subject of a dreadful mix-up on more than one occasion.
This year’s final will be staged at the Puskás Aréna in Hungary’s capital of Budapest — a city which sounds rather similar to Bucharest, another major Eastern European capital located hundreds of miles away in Romania.
Below are some prime examples of football supporters getting it horribly wrong while embarking on grand tours across the continent to watch their team in action. Hopefully, the following tales of travel woe will serve as a caution to those Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain fans who are making the trip to watch the Champions League final in person later this month.
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From Bilbao to Budapest. Or is it Bucharest?
Perhaps the most pertinent example of the Bucharest-Budapest gaffe came in 2012, when hundreds of Athletic Club fans got their wires crossed and ended up missing out on watching their beloved side play in the Europa League final.
Having seen Athletic battle past the likes of Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester United and Sporting CP en route, fans were keen to see if their team would go all the way by beating LaLiga rivals Atlético Madrid in the final.
Unfortunately for a group of around 400 supporters, a disastrous error was made while organizing their travel arrangements that saw them accidentally charter a flight to Budapest for the big game despite the final being staged around 530 miles (and one international border) away in Bucharest.
But it turns out it’s a rather easy mistake to make …
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Bucharest and Budapest once again
After failing to heed the lessons of history, a small group of French football fans suffered a similar fate in 2021 when attempting to travel to watch the national team play at the COVID-delayed Euro 2020.
Just to make things extra difficult for traveling supporters, the 2020 tournament was staged in 11 cities across 11 different European countries, with games taking place in London, Rome, Munich, Baku, Seville, Amsterdam, Glasgow, Saint Petersburg, Copenhagen and — yep, you guessed it, Budapest and Bucharest.
The aforementioned France fans were hoping to watch their team play Hungary in a group-stage match at the Puskás Aréna in Budapest. Instead, they erroneously navigated their way to Bucharest, and were forced to watch the match in a local bar instead of in the seats in the stadium they had paid for.
Thankfully, their trip wasn’t entirely in vain as France won their group and booked a round-of-16 tie against Switzerland a few days later — a game that took place at the Arena Nationala … in Bucharest.
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Liverpool fans walk alone to wrong Belgian town
Two touring Liverpool fans had the misfortune of seeing their travel woes go viral in 2019 when they mixed up two Belgian cities and missed a Champions League game as a result.
After meticulous planning, the pair turned up in the beautiful city of Ghent with plenty of time to spare. The only minor issue was that Liverpool were playing in Genk, approximately 100 miles away.
They realized their mistake only around 30 minutes before kickoff, after the intrepid fans had presumably spent some time failing to locate a stadium located on the other side of Belgium. They were able to find a local bar and watch the game there, but it wasn’t long before news of their hilarious plight began to spread on social media.
Mercifully, the Liverpool supporters’ blushes were at least partly spared in the form of an olive branch offered by Racing Genk, who invited them to attend a game at their stadium the following weekend (assuming they could find their way there.)
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Of course, Genk could have been playing any team in the Belgian First Division, but by sheer quirk of the fixture list the opponents on the day just so happened to be KAA Gent. It was meant to be.
Belgium fans travel to Wales, the village, not Wales, the country
When it comes to Belgian blunders, the shoe was very much on the other foot in the summer of 2015 when a group of Belgium fans set out to watch their national side face Wales in a Euro 2016 qualifier.
In what proved to be an overly lackadaisical approach to navigation, the friends simply typed “Wales” into their GPS and set off on the road. After failing to double-check their route, it wasn’t until their system guided them to a small village in South Yorkshire, England, that the Belgium fans realized the scale of their oversight.
Rather than being taken across the Welsh border, the GPS had instead let them head for a village called “Wales” on the outskirts of Rotherham, around 200 miles away from their intended destination at the Cardiff City Stadium.
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They did have enough time to turn the car around and hurtle to Cardiff in time for the match, only to watch their side slump to a disappointing 1-0 loss.
Barcelona fan goes to St. James Park instead of St. James’ Park
The most recent story of a football travel mix-up is also one of the most unbelievable. In March, Barcelona made the trip to Newcastle United’s St. James’ Park for their Champions League round-of-16 first leg. Their fans followed suit. Well, all except one.
One Spanish fan instead managed to find his way to St. James Park (without that oh-so-crucial apostrophe), home to third-tier side Exeter City at the opposite end of England, some 360-plus miles and a six-hour car journey away.
The League One club tweeted a photo of the bamboozled Barça fan and offered him a match ticket for their fixture that same night. So, rather than watching Lamine Yamal, Pedri, Robert Lewandowski and Marcus Rashford, he got to see Exeter lose to Lincoln City.
