£1,000 for Chelsea seats

Chelsea will host the most expensive game in English football history.

Tickets for the Champions League semi-final match against Liverpool are expected to sell for as much as £2,000 a pair.

Touts are already demanding £1,300 for two seats at Stamford Bridge for the match on Wednesday week.

Prices will rise as kick-off gets closer, with top City firms regarding the London match of the two-leg tie as an "unmissable" event for corporate hospitality.

At the moment the highest price being charged for two tickets is £1,310 by an online agency. The cheapest seats on offer cost £850 a pair. One agency said there had already been hundreds of enquiries, many from corporate buyers.

Today Chelsea fans' groups said they were "very, very disappointed" that many genuine supporters were likely to be priced out of one of the most important nights in the club's history.

Jez Walters, a spokesman for the CFCnet fans' website, said: "It is the really loyal supporters who were there during the bad times when we were being relegated who deserve to be at these big games. But now they can't get tickets."

He said there was a well organised network of touts at Chelsea that had been successful in obtaining thousands of tickets for every match.

A spokesman for Chelsea said it had put in place a range of measures to find out who was supplying the tickets to the touts.

The club employs a "tout detective" to buy tickets from agencies and trace the Chelsea members and season ticket holders who supplied them.

Earlier this year it cancelled 2,000 club memberships that had been taken out by touts. Around 1,600 tickets have been allocated for UEFA officials and sponsors of the Champions League. Alan Bloore, deputy chairman of the Football Supporters' Federation, blamed UEFA for inadequate policing of ticket distribution for its big games.

He said: "The FA do try, if they see tickets advertised on eBay or online agencies, they will go and buy them and try and find out where they came from. But UEFA seem to take the view that 'if someone is making money out of it then so what.'"

Just a handful of semi-final tickets are available through official channels to certain season ticket holders only. For the fortunate few the price can be as little as £38 but with demand far outweighing supply, touts have been able to force up the prices.

A spokeswoman for UEFA said: "It has nothing to do with us, it is the clubs who are selling the tickets."

Liverpool will meet Chelsea, who knocked out Bayern Munich in the last round, at Stamford Bridge on 27 April. The second leg will be played at Liverpool's Anfield ground on 3 May.

FA Cup finals usually command the highest rates. Last year's Manchester United-Millwall final saw tickets being offered for as much as £700 each.

However, it is thought the record is currently held by the 1999 final when Manchester United chased their historic treble, having already won the Premiership and booked a place in the Champions League final.

Fans were paying almost £1,000 per ticket hours before the clash with Newcastle United at Wembley in that year's final.