Roma How-To: Tessera del Tifoso Card

Introduced back in 2009/2010, the Tessera del Tifoso card is basically a “supporters ID card”. The Italian Ministry of the Interior brought about this measure primarily as a response to the occasional violence in Serie A stadia. Fans who simply wish to attend a home match at the Olimpico are not required to be tessera del tifoso card holders, you can simply purchase tickets as outlined in our earlier post. However, if you wish to attend an away match, not have to carry paper tickets, or just simply want to officially become an “official” Romanista, the tessera del tifoso card is for you!

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Preparing to Purchase the Card

The easiest way to purchase the card is via ticketone.it. Before you purchase anything, you will need to prepare a few items:

• Digital color photo of your face (passport photo, or as I did, a shadow-less selfie in front of a white wall) Note that the website will want this in a jpeg format, under 72kb, and with a dimension of 240x320.
• Your passport
• A credit card (they will charge you in Euros, if you have a card that doesn’t charge foreign transaction fees, use that)

The next step will be to follow this link to create a ticketone account, page shown below:

Purchasing the Card

This link will lead you directly to the page where you can purchase the “AS Roma Club Privilege - Fidelity Card”. After choosing your number of cards to purchase, you will arrive at your “shopping cart” screen, shown below. Select one of the shipping options on the bottom left and then login to you account. You will then click “go to verification” at the bottom right.

The next page will display your “Buyer’s Details” that you gave during the creation of your account. Here you can specify if you would like your card to be delivered to a different address than the one on your account. Below this, you will see the following portion of the page, where you will begin to insert all of the information associated with each card you purchase. This where things get a bit confusing, so I will go through it step by step below.

• Select if this is a new fidelity card or a renewal
• Upload your photo
• Enter the card holder’s “personal data”. For Place of Birth, you will enter your city of birth if born within Italy. If you were not born in Italy, you will need to type in the country of your birth IN ITALIAN. For example, those from the United States will need to type “Stati Uniti d’America”.
• Enter your contact information
• Enter residence information. Here’s where they trick you up. You will now type in the country IN ENGLISH. Another curve ball is that you need to type “USA” to get “USA - Stati Uniti d’America” to appear.
• Enter your domicile address, basically a fancy word for your permanent address, the one you have on your drivers license, tax return, etc.
• Finally, you will enter your passport information, click send data, and then click go to payment.

The final step will be entering your credit card information. Funny how when it comes time to take your money, they finally make the process easy.

Final Thoughts

Roma’s season ticket office advised the following upon purchase of my card:

Following the purchase, a temporary card in pdf format will be sent to your email. This temporary card can be used away only if the home team will authorize the use. Please contact the home team before purchasing the trip ticket.

The delivery of the final pass is between 3/4 weeks after purchase.

Once in possession of your card (or PDF in situations described above), you will be eligible to purchase tickets in the “Settore Ospiti” or “Away Section” for Roma matches. In addition, you can now use your card to carry tickets for home matches. The how-to post on home match tickets includes a few sentences about entering your tessera del tifoso number and pin, which you will find in an email that is sent by ticketone following the purchase of your tessera del tifoso card.

Up next, I’ll get into a few more details on the process of purchasing away match tickets.