Champions League final tickets soar to £9,000 on the eve of Liverpool's showdown with Real Madrid

Champions League final tickets are being re-sold for more than £9,000 with Liverpool fans facing a desperate scramble to get hold of one before Saturday's final.

The Reds take on Spanish giants Real Madrid in Paris on Saturday night at the Stade de France, as they chase a third trophy win this season.

Liverpool and Real Madrid both received allocations of 19,618 tickets but many more are keen to grab a ticket, leading to eye-watering prices on popular re-sale websites.

UEFA's initial fan ballot gave supporters a range of ticketing options between €70 (£60) and €690 (£586).

But with those tickets long sold, fans without one have desperately turned to re-sale websites in the hope of landing a precious seat for the final at the Stade de France, which can hold up to 70,000 people.

The top-tier VIP Longside hospitality package is being promoted on livefootballtickets.com at £12,500, while the next category 1 hospitality ticket is available for £9,995.

Of the non-VIP tickets, fans face paying just under £9,000 for a Category 1 ticket, while the cheapest restricted view seat has been made available at just over £1,880, a total of £1,300 more than UEFA's most expensive offering in the fan ballot.

Earlier this week Merseyside Police have warned against buying from 'scammers' online.

'Buying a fake ticket could be a costly mistake,' they wrote on Twitter. 'Don't get caught out.'

That public appeal came after it emerged that fake tickets for the final are being sold to Liverpool fans for just £50.

Pictures emerged of the 'blag' tickets being flogged to fans of the Premier League club, which bear striking resemblance to those being offered through official channels for the match in Paris.

Ray Mcdonald, a Liverpool fan from Cheshire, revealed how he and his friends received their tickets on Tuesday night ahead of the final in Paris this Saturday, May 28.

But after examining the tickets - which cost £1,000 each - the group realised the PDFs were in fact fake.

He said they have been conned out of £19,000 by scammers selling fake Champions League final tickets online.

In a statement on Tuesday, Liverpool revealed some of their supporters had been caught out by the fake tickets and and warned those who attempt to resell their seats to others online - most likely at a huge markup on the face value price - could face lifetime bans.

'There has unfortunately been an increase in the number of fans being defrauded, online in particular, by fake match ticket offers,' Liverpool said in their statement.

'If any supporter is offered a ticket online, they should report it to LFC and to Action Fraud.

'Liverpool FC will not stand idly by and watch people try to sell tickets they have been fortunate enough to get access to via the ballot.

'All reports of ticket touting, or online ticket fraud, will be investigated in line with the LFC sanctions process. If a supporter has been found to have offered a ticket for sale online, this could result in a lifetime ban for that individual.'

The ticketing row angered Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp, who said the system is 'absolutely not right' when asked about it last week.

'It is absolutely not right, but it happens everywhere,' he said.

'It doesn't make it better, just in this specific case you are not only paying more than last time for a ticket, but you only get 50 per cent of the tickets and the rest goes to people who pay thousands and thousands for the tickets.'

UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin defended the ticketing system and allocation in response to Klopp's criticism.

'UEFA doesn't get more tickets than the others. Some tickets go to the market, some tickets go to the fans and some go to the partners. It's not UEFA. I'm not giving tickets for free to my friends or selling to my friends,' he said.

'It's the system that works, and clubs couldn't function differently.

'For us, not much will change if all the tickets will be 10 euros, but it will change a lot for the clubs. A lot.'