Thread: World Cup Tickets Disaster

This year’s World Cup is in deep trouble as fans refuse to buy tickets, blaming greed by businessmen friends of Sepp Blatter and fears about safety in South Africa.

Unofficial World Cup ticket brokers, approved agents, black market operators and national associations are all struggling to sell nearly one million unwanted seats for first round matches.

One dealer in the unofficial ticket and travel market said, ‘The word is already on the street, the event is a bomb, it’s a bust, it’s on the floor, the unsafe atmosphere and the cost of travel and hotels has made this an awful event to sell.’

Another broker told me, ‘They talk about 450,000 fans coming. I predict between 125,000 to 150,000. This is turning into a huge disaster for FIFA and the South African organisers.’

Even African fans are refusing to buy. 2010 chief executive Danny Jordaan has been forced to admit, ‘Less that 100,000 tickets have been sold to fans in the six African countries competing in the Finals.’

Jordaan added, ‘This will be the first time in World Cup history that the host nation is not topping the ticket sales list. It will be tragic if this trend continues and I appeal to local fans to come out and support their country.’

This may be desperation. South African bloggers repeatedly criticize ‘outrageous’ prices far beyond the pocket of the average fan.

In England fans who placed multiple internet orders hoping they might get tickets for at least some games are now burdened with unwanted and possibly unsalable tickets.

One England fan said, ‘I applied for tickets to seven matches for me and three friends. To my surprise I received everything I asked for. The trouble is that my three friends did the same and they have also obtained 28 tickets for the same seven matches. We now have 112 tickets for these games.’

Demand is so slow that last week the England FA admitted to fans, ‘We currently have enough tickets to satisfy demand for all our matches.’

The Dutch Federation is having problems selling its allocation and has asked FIFA to postpone the closing date for sales. A spokeswoman said, ‘In the past we had to lobby for more tickets, now we lobby for more time.’

There appears to be a similar lack of interest in Germany. The German federation refuses to reveal how many tickets they have sold for the first round games but reliable sources say the figure is likely to be less than 1,000.

Its been reported that some German cities are preparing to erect big screens in public places, as in 2006, for fans who prefer to stay home.

It’s the same story in Denmark where yet again, fans are turning their backs on FIFA’s rackets.

But FIFA are telling a different story. Last week they announced, ‘We have seen a significant rise in the interest of South African fans. In addition, currently the countries outside South Africa from which more requests have been received via FIFA.com are the United Kingdom, USA and Germany.’

The unofficial ticket dealers say that of the 48 matches in the first round, only three are easy to sell. ‘We can make money on England and the USA, Holland and Denmark and Brazil versus Portugal,’ said one. ‘There are ten additional games worth watching – like Germany and Serbia or Italy and Paraguay – but there’s no great demand for these tickets.

‘We can’t sell anything like the amount we expected in Mexico, Japan, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Only Brazilian sales are holding up. Dealers around the world are now stuck with rooms and tickets for games that people cannot afford to go to.’

Sales are even more disappointing in America where 79,000 tickets have been bought on the Internet by brokers and travel agents – who are now reported to be trying to re-sell at face value – just to dump them.

FIFA has awarded the exclusive rights to package tickets and rooms in South Africa to the MATCH company, set up by Mexican businessmen Jaime and Enrique Byrom. Shareholders include a Japanese company named in a major FIFA bribery scandal and Philippe Blatter, nephew of the FIFA president.

Travel agents have to pay MATCH $30,000 just to be allowed to buy tickets to package with rooms and sometimes flights. Then they have to pay up to 35% surcharge on every ticket MATCH sells them, boosting a ticket with a face value of $160 to as much $244. So MATCH can take up to $84 from each fan.

The company has also established an iron grip on rooms. Hotel chains and B&Bs want business from fans and have signed up with MATCH – and must pay them 30% of their gross charges – so driving up prices again.

Added to the mix of expensive tickets and accommodation is the high cost of flying to South Africa. That deterred fans travelling to Japan and Korea in 2002 but those countries were affluent enough to soak up spare tickets. Most South Africans simply don’t have this kind of disposable income.

Ticket brokers say that although vast amounts are being spent on new and renovated stadiums transport links are poor and fans are recoiling from having to spend hours on expensive buses travelling on poor roads to distant games.

Despite FIFA’s insistence that South Africa’s violent crime rate is not a problem there was shock when Reuters football editor Mike Collett was robbed during the Confederations Cup in June last year – by traffic police. When I was in Johannesburg last November my hosts were insistent that I did not go out at night on my own.

One ticket broker told me of his surprise last month in Cape Town for the Final Draw when staff at his hotel begged him not go out for a healthy stroll. ‘Many fans have heard these stories already and decided to stay home to watch on television,’ he said. ‘And now the attack on the Togo team in Angola is going to make a bad situation worse.’

‘FIFA is going to lose a lot of money on these tickets,’ says an agent, ‘and they may have to give a lot away to fill the stadiums in the first round – and maybe even the group of 16. And it looks like we will have to take a hit. Most agents have already booked hotel rooms they now can’t sell.’

Reports from inside FIFA say that Sepp Blatter isn’t handling the crisis well. He believed that taking the World Cup to South Africa would win him a Nobel Peace Prize. As it turns into a potential train-wreck colleagues say he is drinking too much, his face has turned puffy and gray and he’s suffering violent mood swings. It was during one of these, they say, that he recently fired hapless press chief Hans Klaus.

Now Blatter’s greed – and that of the favoured circle of businessmen he looks after – may yet bring him crashing down. A World Cup disaster would enrage sponsors and damage his plan to be re-elected in 2011.

Another problem that won’t go away is the police investigation into FIFA officials who pocketed big bribes from the ISL marketing company in return for lucrative World Cup marketing contracts.

Reliable Swiss sources say that former president Joao Havelange is reluctant to visit the country because he has been summoned for interrogation about the scandal. Another member of the executive committee is also said to be staying away from Switzerland.

Whoever takes home the World Cup trophy, young Mr Blatter expects to be a winner. That’s Philippe Blatter, nephew of FIFA supremo Sepp Blatter.

President Blatter enthuses about the ‘family of FIFA’ and he practices what he preaches. The most lucrative business opportunities at the World Cup go to a small group of businessmen and now his nephew Philippe Blatter is getting his share.

Philippe has been the boss of Infront, a Swiss-based sports marketing company, since 2006. An important shareholder is billionaire Saudi banker Sheikh Salih Kamel, who put his wealth behind President Blatter’s re-election in 2002. The Sheikh also owns ART, a satellite TV company, delivering exclusive sports programming and the FIFA World Cup to the Arab world.

The Infront company chooses to base itself in the Zug offices that previously housed FIFA’s former marketing partner the ISL company until it went bust in 2001.

ISL had the exclusive contract to film the World Cup for the world’s television networks. Infront has inherited this contract. ISL controlled the archive of World Cup films that command high fees from broadcasters. Infront has also inherited this business.

In the spring of 2008 embarrassed ISL executives admitted in court paying an amazing $100 million in bribes to sports officials, mostly at FIFA, in return for lucrative contracts. One was for rights to sell World Cup TV to broadcasters, earning a reported commission of 25%.

That deal has also been inherited by Philippe Blatter’s Infront – in partnership with the Japanese Dentsu advertising and marketing agency. In 2008 a Dentsu executive was accused of taking more than £2 million in kickbacks from ISL.

It’s a small world of big football profits. Dentsu are also partnering Infront this year in the specially created MATCH Hospitality company. FIFA has given them world-wide rights to sell travel, hotels, 380,000 tickets, catering and ‘hostess services’ to wealthy fans travelling to South Africa. The European concession has gone to the Sportfive company, former employer of FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke.

The majority shareholders in MATCH are the Mexican brothers Jaime and Enrique Byrom, associates of former FIFA president Joao Havelange, who have been trading in precious tickets since the 1986 World Cup.

The Byroms’ Manchester-based company now controls the majority of FIFA’s ticket and accommodation business. They were big in 2002 and 2006, have World Cup ticketing for this year and again in Brazil in 2014.

It has never been explained how the Byroms allowed FIFA vice-president Jack Warner to acquire around 6,000 tickets for the Germany World Cup, making millions of dollars profits.

Some brokers predict a flood of cheap tickets dumped on the market this summer. They say that sponsors, whose clients fear South Africa’s violent image, are taking up less than 40% of the 550,000 they’ve been granted. In past years tickets allocated to sponsors have ended up on the street.

One of the many ticketing scandals of 2006 was the selling of Zimbabwe’s allocation to a former FIFA employee. He is fireproof; he worked in FIFA’s finance department and knows FIFA’s tightest secret - how much money Sepp Blatter trousers every year.

The franchise to sell this year’s allocation of tickets for Zimbabwe has been awarded by MATCH to Philip Chiyangwa, a relative of President Robert Mugabe who claims to have already sold $600,000 worth of VIP hospitality packages.




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