UEFA’s relentless pursuit of glitzy, exotic final venues has crossed a line into outright negligence, and the Foreign Office’s latest “take care” advisory for British supporters heading to Istanbul is the strongest indictment yet. For a decade, the governing body has traded on the romance of the Bosporus — the 2005 Champions League miracle, the 2023 Super Cup sunset — while systematically ignoring the cold, hard reality that traveling fans face on the ground. The FCDO’s warning doesn’t mention ticket prices or stadium aesthetics; it flags specific risks of overcrowding, pickpocketing, and political tension in a city where past finals have seen fans caught between police cordons and volatile crowds. When the state department that monitors global security advises Britons to “take care” simply to attend a football match, UEFA can no longer hide behind marketing brochures.
The evidence is not abstract but painfully concrete. In the 2019 Europa League final between Chelsea and Arsenal in Baku, fans were stranded by travel chaos; in Paris for the 2022 Champions League final, Liverpool supporters were tear-gassed and robbed in a fiasco UEFA