Who has sold the most tickets to a single concert?
Michel Jackson? Coldplay? Taylor Swift?
All fine guesses, but up until recently, it was Italian pop-rocker Vasco Rossi – also known mononymously as Vasco – who had the most attended ticketed concert in the world. Rossi’s record was set in 2017, when he performed in front of 225,173 fans at his concert at the Parco Enzo Ferrari in Modena.
Now, Croatian singer Marko Perković – known professionally as Thompson and who has a song which opens with the chant “Za dom spremni!”, the Croatian version of the Nazi salute “Sieg Heil” – is on track to break that record.
The 58-year-old rocker, whose fans are known for their chants “Kill a Serb” and “Here we go Ustasha” (the Croatian fascist and ultranationalist organization), is set to take to the stage in Zagreb to perform at the city’s Hippodrome venue on 5 July.
According to new reports, the show at the 47-hectare horse racing track has sold an impressive 281,774 tickets in less than 24 hours – making it the highest-attended single show on record, overlapping the likes of Paul McCartney in 1990 in Rio, and Tina Turner in 1988 for her legendary Break Every Rule World Tour, also in Rio.
The company behind the tickets sold, Entrio, claimed to be “extremely proud” that it was able to efficiently and effectively handle “one of the most complex ticket sales for a single concert in the world.”
“The Entrio engineering team worked for almost 30 hours straight, during an unprecedented rush of fans to buy tickets, to optimise the server infrastructure, solve a number of technical challenges, maximize sales, eliminate three powerful hacker attacks and ensure that hundreds of other events that we simultaneously sold in three markets were running successfully,” according to a statement from Entiro.
No news on how proud they are about Thompson and his glorification of the regime responsible for crimes against humanity during World War II in the Jasenovac and Stara Gradiska concentration camps…
The Zagreb Hippodrome has previously hosted several mega concerts by famous bands, including Metallica in 2010 (more than 30,000 fans), Ed Sheeran in 2024 (70,000) and The Rolling Stones, who had more than 80,000 fans attend their Bridges To Babylon show in 1998. This was the first major concert in independent Croatia, coming shortly after the reintegration of Eastern Slavonia.
