The queue for tickets at the Indoor Stadium.

Mr James Linus has been a Liverpool football fan for 40 years.

Much to his disappointment, his three daughters, aged 17, 19, and 21, all support Manchester United.

With the Premier League football club heading to Singapore in July to compete in the International Champions Cup (ICC), Mr Linus, a civil servant, took leave from work yesterday to buy tickets for his family and his wife's sister's family.

It was the opening day of ticket sales.

Mr Linus and his wife drove to the SingPost Centre at Paya Lebar to buy a two-day package for the matches at the National Stadium, where United will play Inter on July 20, and Juventus will play Tottenham Hotspur on July 21.

But the SingPost outlet they visited sold only single match tickets, he told The New Paper.

Disappointed but undeterred, Mr Linus and his wife decided to go down to the Singapore Indoor Stadium Box Office to buy tickets there.

Tickets, which cost between $38 and $370, were also sold at The Star Performing Arts Centre Box Office and Scotts Square Concierge Desk.

But when Mr Linus and his wife got to the Indoor Stadium, they saw that there was a long queue.

"We joined and stayed in the queue for an hour but it didn't move at all, so we gave up," said Mr Linus, 51.

When TNP went there at 11.45am, there were more than 100 people in line. Fans said they had queued for over two hours.

One of them, Mr Ronnie Ng, a consultant in his 40s, said: "The tickets are already expensive. If scalpers are here to buy tickets, depriving true fans and trying to profit at the expense of others, I do not think this is right."

Yesterday, a check on Carousell showed two Category 1 tickets, originally priced at $218 each, being offered for $840 a pair.

SLOWDOWN

Besides challenging queues, fans said they also faced slowdowns on the Sports Hub website.

Ms Denise Gay, 44, said she and her husband decided to tag-team and queue separately - he went online while she went to the Indoor Stadium.

"My husband started queuing online at 10am when it went on sale, but could not get the tickets," she said.

Ms Gay, who was in the queue from 9.45am at the Indoor Stadium, said she eventually got her four tickets - costing $68 each - at 12.15pm.

An ICC spokesman told TNP that it is planning to release additional tickets for the Man United vs Inter match.