Attending a Boca Juniors match at La Bombonera

Attending a Boca Juniors match at La Bombonera was at the top of my wishlist as a football fan, it’s now done!

Boca Juniors is certainly one of the most popular clubs in the world: their supporters are known to be particularly passionate, their stadium is magnificent, Maradona played there, …

As a tourist, it’s especially difficult to get tickets: 95% of seats are reserved for season ticket holders, and there’s no real indication of how the remaining 5% are distributed.

So I used the agency LandingPadBA, with whom I’d already been to a match Racing vs San Lorenzo.

Even through an agency, demand for Boca Juniors matches is so high that you have to plan well ahead. The first match I wanted to attend was sold out, even though I tried 10 days in advance. I understood that the agency only knows 2 or 3 days in advance how many tickets they’ll have, and tickets are allocated in the chronological order of the tourist request queue.

I ended up getting a ticket for the Boca Juniors vs Central Cordoba match.

We were told to meet at 4pm (for a match starting at 7:15pm) in the same pizzeria as last time.

While there were 9 tourists for the previous match (which was a derby between Racing and San Lorenzo), this time there were about fifty of us! At least half had bought a Boca jersey for the occasion, I was impressed!

I met up with Mathias, the guide who accompanied us last time.

After eating and drinking, we left with 4 minibuses, heading to La Bombonera!

During the trip, the guide told us about Argentine football. He’s a River Plate fan, Boca Juniors’ rivals. It was hilarious listening to him explain with humor that he doesn’t understand why we pay to see such a useless team and that he hates the jerseys we’re wearing, haha.

Our tickets were distributed, and we understood the scheme. The cards we got were season ticket holders’ cards (which we had to return after the match). For the occasion, my name was Ramos.

The guide explained that if the police questioned us, we hadn’t paid to be there that evening, and that a friend had lent us his card. Given our faces, not sure we’d be very credible if it came to that 😀

Unlike the previous match, the guide also explained that he wouldn’t accompany us into the stadium; he’d stay outside. I imagine it’s so hard to get tickets and the business is so lucrative that it would be a waste to allocate seats to guides.

Although it’s a bit stressful to manage on your own with a ticket that isn’t in your name, it actually poses no difficulty: a search, a turnstile where you tap your card, then an identity check (which serves to identify banned fans, and is a formality for foreigners) and we’re in!

The stadium, with a capacity of 57,200 spectators, is certainly not the most aesthetic, but it’s legendary! I was quite impressed by the steepness of the stands, which seemed steeper than average. The vibrant yellow and blue colors leave no doubt: we’re in the Boca Juniors stadium!

As an anecdote, the pitch isn’t in great condition. The stadium served as a polling station for the presidential elections a few months earlier. And they didn’t remove the marquees for several weeks, leaving the pitch without sunlight for that long! So much so that several matches had to be moved before the situation improved.

The stadium filled up gradually; with a weekday evening match (a Wednesday), I was a bit worried the atmosphere might fall short of Boca’s reputation. Not at all! We’re in Argentina, in Buenos Aires, in the Boca Juniors stadium, football is more important than anything else, and the stadium would be full.