Liverpool Fans Travel to Wrong Belgian City for Champions League Game

In Thursday’s Hot Clicks: Two soccer fans make a very expensive geography error, Simone Biles’s incredible first pitch and more.

At least Liverpool won

Vincent Van Malderen/Facebook

Two English men learned the hard way that they should have paid closer attention in geography class when they realized they were in the wrong city in Belgium mere minutes before the soccer game they traveled to attend was about to start. 

The guys traveled from England to watch Liverpool in the Champions League against Genk on Wednesday. Instead, they ended up in Ghent (spelled Gent in the local Dutch). Whoops!

According to a Facebook post from a patron in the bar, the directionally challenged Brits each spent €150 on a flight to Belgium and €70 on a ticket to the game, only to realize 30 minutes before the opening kick that they were a two-hour drive from where it was being played. 

The pair decided instead to watch the match on TV in a pub called The Irish Towers in Ghent. There, they gave an interview to a local TV channel and joked that they had simply misread a sign on the highway. 

Dikke pech voor 2 voetbalfans van Liverpool FC. De twee maakten vandaag de fout van hun leven. Ze zakten af naar België...

Posted by AVS on Wednesday, October 23, 2019

There are two silver linings here, though. First of all, Liverpool beat Genk easily, 4–1. And the wayward travelers may end up seeing some soccer on their trip anyway. The team in Ghent, KAA Gent, offered them tickets to the club’s Europa League game against Wolfsburg on Thursday. 

They can also take solace in the fact that they’re not the first people to do this. Last year, a fan of a Portuguese team traveled to the wrong Frankfurt in Germany.

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UPDATE: All three prizes have been claimed. Thanks to everyone who entered.

We have an extremely practical giveaway today: a portable power bank to charge your devices. This one is made by Traveler’s Choice and it retails for around $30. It has enough power to charge your phone for five hours and is airport compliant. 

We’re giving away three of them to Hot Clicks readers. Here’s how you can get one. Go back to yesterday’s Hot Clicks and find the name of the home team in the soccer game that was interrupted by a guy with a parachute. Send me an email (dan.gartland@simail.com) with the subject line charger giveaway (all lower case, “giveaway” one word) and put the correct answer in the body of the email. The 25th, 50th and 100th readers to email me following those instructions will win.

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