With less than two months to go until the Opening Ceremony at Celtic Park, the official ticketing website is still showing a high availability for £180 ($303/€227) and £250 ($421/€309) tickets for the showpiece event on July 23.

Organisers have refused to give out exact details on how many tickets are left to sell following the release of 100,000 tickets two weeks ago, however, their website shows a high availability for a considerable number of the sports on show at the Games.

The original release of extra tickets was hit by a string of technical failures, with the ticketing website and telephone hotline repeatedly crashing.

Organisers suspended the sales process until last Wednesday (May 21), with this second sales period seeing around 50,000 remaining tickets released across three days.

Despite the technical problems being settled, sales seem to have faltered with tickets for nine sports, plus the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, still widely available for purchase.

Many sessions across badminton, boxing, bowls, powerlifting, rugby sevens, squash, table tennis, weightlifting and wrestling have high availability for tickets.

Hockey, athletics and netball also have a number of tickets still readily available.

Tickets for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, which were among the first set to be made available on Wednesday, are also still largely unsold.

Many critics are blaming the problem on fans being "priced out", with a majority of the unsold tickets in the premium tiers of tickets sales.

These tickets, for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies for example, lie at prices ranging from £80 ($135/€99) to £250, which has left many critics venting their frustrations over social media.

One such critic, Paul McGonigal, tweeted: "Commonwealth games tickets £80 to £250 opening - closing ceremonies. Aye right! #shocking."

Another, Lisa Palombo, added: "Bought two opening ceremony tickets today for Commonwealth. Think I may have a seat next to Sir Chris Hoy, given what I paid for them."

Fans have shown their frustration at the high tickets prices for some events at the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games ©Twitter



Tweeters were not the only people concerned over the high prices with Peter Kelly from Poverty Alliance in Scotland, telling the Daily Record: "These are supposed to be not only Scotland's but Glasgow's Games and they need to be accessible to ordinary working-class people here.

He added: "£250 is more than a week's wages for a lot of full-time workers.

"If we want it to be a Games for everyone, we need to have prices that reflect that."

To help resolve the problem, which could result in empty seats during the Games, Scottish Labour's culture spokeswoman Patricia Ferguson yesterday called for any of the expensive seats which remain unsold to be gifted to the local community.

"Having been involved in getting the Games to Glasgow, I want them to be a great success and I'm sure, now that the problems with ticketing have been resolved, sales will pick up," she said.

"I also hope that if there are tickets left over, they would be given to local sports and community clubs to avoid the situation at the Olympics in London where empty seats were visible."

For the boxing events set to be held at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre Precinct, the Glasgow 2014 website still shows high availability across most sessions, including a number of the medal finals.

Celtic Park is set to be the venue for the Glasgow 2014 Opening Ceremony with the stadium seeing a large reduction in its capacity due to a large LED screen being used in the Ceremony ©Getty Images



Asked whether Glasgow 2014 was concerned over the sales of tickets, a spokesperson said: "We're delighted with the enthusiasm shown across all the team sports and ceremonies.

"Additional sports for which there is currently no availability are judo and shooting which join aquatics (diving and swimming), cycling (mountain and track), gymnastics (artistic) and triathlon.

"We thank everyone for their passionate support so far.

"While there are still lots of great opportunities to be part of the Games, tickets are selling fast so don't leave it too late to buy, especially if you have specific events or days you want to be part of."

More than one million tickets have been put on sale for the Games, with the unsold tickets likely to be less than five cent of the total available.

The Games are set to kick-off on July 23 when fans pile in to the 35,000-capacity Celtic Park for the Opening Ceremony.

Action will then continue until August 3 when the Closing Ceremony brings a close to proceedings at the home of Scottish football, Hampden Park.

Contact the writer of this story at [email protected]


Related stories
May 2014: Delayed Glasgow 2014 ticketing process reopens with first of three sales phases
May 2014: Glasgow 2014 "confident" problems rectified as announce phased tickets release
May 2014: Ticket sales for Glasgow 2014 to remain closed for five more days
May 2014: Glasgow 2014 admit unsuccessful customers charged "in error" as ticketing crisis continues
May 2014: "Urgent review" into Glasgow 2014 ticket fiasco, but could take days to fix