It smells like a festival. It looks like a festival. It is a festival! Welcome to The Queue, the weirdest among Wimbledon's strange traditions, the line that forms every day to get a ticket. Since the previous midnight, thousands of people camp with their tents in the park right in front of the All England Club to buy one of the 500 tickets available for the center court, one of the 500 tickets for court 1, one of the 500 tickets for court 2, or simply to buy one of the passes to the venue. The first ones will pay between 115 euros and 400 euros, and the prices will decrease to 30 euros for the ground pass. Seems simple? Well, it's not.
"It's true, this is a festival. Think that to enter the center court, you have to arrive before two in the morning. I came with the first subway, I've been here since six, but if I didn't get a ticket, it wouldn't matter to me. I enjoy the experience," tells EL MUNDO Katie Williams, who lives north of London and has been queuing for eight years. It's 10 in the morning, she has number 3134 and is close to reaching the ticket booth. She brought a picnic bag with a coffee thermos, sandwiches, and chips, but with her friend Lydia and some girls behind her, they have already opened a bottle of white wine. The process could be simplified with a virtual queue on the Wimbledon website, but where would the white wine be. The Queue has a party, has tradition, and also has elitism.
The Grand Slam, after all, is a mirror of society. "Why are there so many empty seats this year at Wimbledon?" asked the Metro newspaper this week, and the conclusion couldn't be simpler: because the sun is shining. This year, temperatures have reached 34 degrees, an unheard-of high in London, some stands are not covered, and the owners of the best tickets prefer to be in the shade drinking prosecco in the Village. They have paid 92,000 euros for one of the 2,500 'debentures', a double pass for five years, but that doesn't obligate them to watch all the matches. Those who usually don't miss out are the lucky ones who have managed to buy tickets online in the public draw held in February - or who have paid a fortune in the illegal resale market - the dedicated ones who have secured one of the 500 tickets in The Queue after hours outdoors, and of course, those who come from the official resale.
Because yes, those who have purchased a ground pass to the All England Club for 30 euros can sign up at the entrance for the resale and access another queue - in this case virtual - to repurchase a ticket. When a spectator leaves before a match ends, their seat goes on sale through an app for only 17.50 euros. If there is a match yet to be played, you're in luck; if there is a set left, great; if there is only one game remaining, also good. "Last year, I managed to see three sets of Alcaraz on the center court," celebrates Williams, who grimaces when the journalist, so inconsiderate, asks if it wouldn't be easier to sell all tickets online and be done with it.
"It's probably true that the English like to queue," admits in response to the same question James Mendelssohn, the head of the stewards who oversee The Queue with as much politeness as rectitude. They are very kind, very polite, but if someone overdoes it with alcohol, they will be expelled, just as if they exceed the break time. Each fan in The Queue has half an hour of break to go to the bathroom or buy food, and the nearest cafeterias are a 15-minute brisk walk away, next to the Southfields metro station. Incidents are rare, although tension is noticeable at six in the morning.
At that time, those who have camped overnight must pack up their tents and other belongings, leave them in the different cloakrooms, and start queuing on foot. More than once, and more than a hundred times, it is the stewards themselves who have to wake up the campers. "There are people who love being part of the queue, friends we see every year. The queue is part of Wimbledon, of the excitement of coming here to watch tennis. It is part of the experience, and we all want the experience to be positive," Mendelssohn says, ensuring that this year, with good weather and no rain, the queues are quite long, but the process will continue for centuries. On its website, in fact, Wimbledon celebrates "continuing to be one of the few major sporting events where it is possible to buy premium tickets on the same day of the match." And they are right. Although the cost is camping all night and spending hours and hours standing in line. It's The Queue. It's a festival!