FIFA officials have finally admitted that their ticket strategy for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa was probably a mistake. Less than two months before the World Cup kicks off there are still thousands of unsold tickets, and just recently FIFA decided to open direct over the counter ticket sales in various points across the host nation.
So far World Cup 2010 tickets were only available for purchase over the internet, in a country were most people don’t have internet access or even a bank account. And just a few weeks before, authorities finally decided to also make tickets available via other more traditional methods such as in financial institution and even local supermarkets. As a result thousands of people created endless tickets queues all over South Africa, in many cases crashing the ticketing system and waiting for over 10 hours under the sun. In one particular case a South African fan actually died while waiting to buy a ticket to the 2010 World Cup tournament.
“I think we should have done this much earlier and open ticket sale points all over South Africa. We should definitely review our ticketing strategy and we have learned a lot for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil” says FIFA representative Jerome Valcke. Before the direct sales begun there were fears of empty stadiums during the World Cup, while many tickets already sold earlier were being returned from customers unable to come to South Africa. Now FIFA is confident that there will be no more issues and expecting an overall occupancy of around 95%. The only World Cup tournament that was completely sold out was in 1994 (United States), but learning from this year’s mistakes can give a push and for 2014 is once again expected to reach 100% capacity.
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