wembley

German football fans will be descending on London in their hundreds of thousands this weekend, with an all-German Champions League final at Wembley taking place on Saturday night. Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund will be battling it out to be crowned champions of Europe, whilst fans will be trying just as hard to get their hands on an elusive ticket to the match.

Wembley is hosting the showpiece match for the second time in three years, and each team will have 25,000 supporters inside the stadium. However, it is expected that those lucky enough to be at Wembley may be dwarfed by the number of those in London without a ticket.

When the tickets went on sale, a grand total of 502,567 Dortmund fans applied for one, with less than one in twenty of them getting allocated one. Similarly, over 250,000 Bayern fans applied for their allocation of just 25,000. All that adds up to a lot of fans willing to travel to London who are without tickets.

The Metropolitan police are (very) conservatively estimating that several thousand German fans will be travelling without tickets, plus there are the 300,000 Germans who are currently living in the UK. When they are all added up, experts are predicting as many as 150,000 German fans could descend on London.

The Home of Football. It's a big name to live up to, especially with the England football team's woeful recent history. But, whilst the team may be struggling along without a permanent manager or captain, Wembley Stadium certainly does not disappoint.

With Euro 2012 now just three months away and the England team dominating the football news in the last month, there was a sense of confusion, but also anticipation in the run up to the game with Holland last night. It was with this backdrop that I caught the tube out to West London.