Security concerns hobble World Cup; FIFA fears games played in empty stadiums
along that this was wildly optimistic: their estimates, based on extrapolation from bookings by January, showed that the more likely number of attendees would be between 1.1 and 2 million.
Now we know that these professional organizers were too optimistic, too. CNN reports that FIFA now expects fewer than 450,000 foreign soccer fans to come to South Africa for the games.
The Canadian Press reports that FIFA said 2.2 million tickets had been sold so far (the majority of which to brokers, commercial partners, and affiliates — see below). Fans in the host country had bought 925,437, followed by the United States with 118,945.
In a stunning admission, FIFA said last week that at least 500,000 tickets to the World Cup are unsold. The Guardian reports that FIFA officials admitted they feared “tragic” empty stadiums at football’s biggest tournament. FIFA did not say exactly how many of the 500,000 tickets still to go were returned from commercial partners and affiliates. Football’s governing body only said it was “a significant number.”
Many of brokers, commercial partners, and affiliates buy blocks of tickets and then turn around and sell them to the public, typically as part of a package which includes plane tickets and hotel stays. To maintain their margin, these wholesalers typically wait until the last minute to lower the price of unsold tickets: if they were to announce how many unsold tickets they still had, people would wait for the price to fall rather than buy now.
Professional event organizers say that in the coming weeks we will likely learn that quite a few of the 450,000 tickets sold to brokers and commercial partners are still unsold, meaning that the number of foreign soccer fans going to South Africa will be lower than the current FIFA estimate of 450,000.
FIFA has given up on selling the 500,000 — tickets it knows for sure have not been sold — to soccer fans outside South Africa, and in a desperate measure announced that tickets would go on sale to the general public in South Africa on 15 April. This means that organizers have less than two months — the games begin 11 June — to sell nearly a quarter of the tournament’s total match tickets to avoid empty seats.
There are two problems here. FIFA conceded that its online ticket-buying process was not suited to local fans, who are generally poor and not used to buying tickets on the Internet.
“This final ticket phase is very important,” CNN quotes FIFA secretary general Jerome Valcke to say at a press conference in Soweto. “We will not want to give that picture of empty seats to the world; all will need to be done in these last days.”
The 2010 World Cup is thus likely to be the first tournament of this magnitude played in half-empty stadiums. The chief of the FIFA World Cup organizing committee, Danny Jordaan, said it would be “tragic” for the host country if stadiums were empty, and urged local fans to “go buy [tickets] now.”
He added: “We have done everything we were asked to do. We have created a [reduced price] category of tickets exclusively for South Africa. We have now implemented over-the-counter sales to make sure the tickets are accessible,” he said. “The final thing is that South Africans must respond. If you are a good host, you must be there.”
