SOCCER/Uefa Champions League final: The first Arsenal and Barcelona fans began to appear on the streets of Paris last night, a rather modest advance party that might easily have been overlooked by the still unsuspecting population of a city where tens of thousands of supporters are due to arrive over the course of the next 24 hours.

Police authorities in the city were last night bracing themselves for the influx which, while expected to be largely peaceful, may still prove chaotic given the substantial numbers of supporters that have decided to make the journey without match tickets.

Neither Uefa nor local officials could accurately estimate the size of the travelling party but around 42,000 of the 77,000 tickets for tomorrow night's game have been distributed by the two participating teams and both admit that they failed miserably to cope with the demand.

Arsenal have around 25,000 season tickets holders and, after setting aside roughly 1,500 tickets for the use of the club, it distributed its allocation on the basis that priority went to those supporters that had also bought tickets for away games from the club during the last two years. Even some of these supporters missed out while none of the club's 130,000 members even got the chance to apply to make a purchase.

By the time the membership at Barcelona came into the reckoning the club had around 8,000 tickets left. For these some 72,579 applications were received.

Many of those who missed out have clearly decided to make the trip anyway. Ease of access is clearly a major factor but flights and trains from both cities have been sold out for more than a week and many supporters are now expected to arrive via a whole string of other airports including Brussels, Lyon and Marseilles.

The prospect of picking up a ticket during the build-up to the game is what has prompted many to make the journey but the early sings are not encouraging with those on sale through internet auction site ebay yesterday routinely attracting bids of between €1,500 and €1,800. The face value of the tickets ranges from €60 to €180 but this appeared to be making little difference to the size of the offers being made.

"That's a lot higher than it cost even to buy a ticket for the World Cup final here eight years ago," observes senior L'Equipe football writer Jean Michel Rouet. "Then it was no more than €1,000 to buy on the black market but this game seems to have captured the imagination to an extraordinary extent and so the prices have soared."

While the clubs received 21,000 tickets each for the game a further 11,000 were sold by Uefa through its annual internet ballot. A further 14,500 tickets were retained by European football's governing body, mainly for distribution to major sponsors while 10,000 were allocated to the French Football Federation (FFF).

Clearly supporters arriving in the city today and tomorrow are hoping to stumble upon tickets from those 35,000 or so initially distributed to neutral parties. The high prices attracted so far may persuade more of those currently in possession to sell but with so many people hoping to buy there would appear to be no great basis for optimism that prices will tumble during the run-up to the game.

Police anticipate some problems around the Stade de France tomorrow evening and are making considerable efforts to keep the two sets of supporters apart before the game.

Their comparatively laid back approach, though, is underlined by the fact that while the security operation for the French Cup final between bitter rivals Paris St Germain and Olympic Marseilles two weeks ago involved some 2,000 officers less than a third of that number will initially be deployed in and around the stadium for this game.

The thousands of ticketless fans have, meanwhile, caused another problem with even the highly developed tourism infrastructure of the French capital stretched to the limit.

Many supporters have been unable to obtain a hotel room for the night of the game and those who got in before the city centre was fully booked up have also had to deal with terribly inflated prices. Camp sites outside the city are reporting a surge in bookings while a significant number of those arriving are expected to do so without having made any accommodation arrangements at all.