I've never had such an emotionally exhausting ticket-buying experience as I have the past week trying to buy tickets to the second, third, fourth and fifth matches of this series, especially so the fourth and fifth ones. (I had other plans the night of the first match so wasn't going to go to that one regardless.)
Today, at around 11:40 a.m. Turkish time, Sunday's match showed up on the ticketing website with a listed for-sale time of noon. Okay, great. This will be over with quickly. But then at noon, no tickets were purchasable, and there was a note saying that they would instead be released at 1 p.m. But that didn't happen either. Once 1 p.m. arrived, that note was replaced with one simply saying that they're not on sale yet. So, that was followed by me not having a clue when they'd be released. Any second? Tomorrow? That uncertainty continued for the next several hours.
Finally, at around 6:40 p.m., it showed that ticket sales would open at 7 p.m. And they actually did. And I immediately reserved four seats, one for myself and three for this family who I met on Monday and helped out ticket-wise then since I had a spare one for that evening's match after someone backed out of going with me. But then when I went to pay for them, I lost them. Some technical issue. And by that point, all of the seats were reserved by others. There was not a single one left.
I kept trying and trying and trying. Finally, about 20 minutes later, one became available (likely a payment error by the person who originally reserved it), and I grabbed it and paid for it as fast as I could type and got it. Although that's great, of course, my focus immediately turned towards getting more for that family. (They had entrusted me in doing my best to get them.) But after so many attempts and refreshes and so on, for more than an hour after, I was never able to purchase even a second ticket, and now it shows as completely sold out. Maybe more seats will be released at a later time, but that seems highly unlikely.
Another point: a considerable majority of the tickets were already accounted for when the public sale opened, I think going to Fenerbahçe fan groups, etc. (That didn't happen for either the second or third matches.) Which on paper sounds good, but are those actually volleyball fans? Or are they more so football fans who simply want to go to a championship match in a sport that they don't normally follow? Regardless, compared to Thursday's match, there were a lot more seats available here, but it was still mostly the 300 and 400 levels.
But, in the end, I'm going. I'm more so sad about who's not going, but I'm sure that I'll get excited about being there as Sunday night gets closer.
All of that said, I'm never doing this again. It has taken so much out of me emotionally and time-wise the past several days trying to get tickets to these matches. If I'm still spending so much time in Istanbul, I'm either going to get season tickets next year (I know that Fenerbahçe and VakifBank sell them, but I don't think that Eczacıbaşı does) or just not put any effort into this next year. Although attending these matches is great, it's just not worth doing all of this.