Post by QPR Report on Apr 15, 2010 6:28:00 GMT
Guardian/Owen Gibson
South Africa's World Cup success hangs on one last push to sell tickets
Today is a crucial day as Fifa-accredited ticket booths across the country begin trying to shift 500,000 tickets to locals
Of all the staging posts that have marked the progress towards Africa's first World Cup, today's could be one of the most significant in deciding its fate. This morning Fifa-accredited ticket booths in the centre of the nine host cities and a network of supermarkets across the country will open for business and begin trying to shift the 500,000 tickets that remain on a first come, first served basis.
That represents almost a fifth of the 2.7m available, with tickets remaining for all 64 games including the final at Soccer City. In all, just over 3m tickets were released, but demand from Europe has been lower than expected.
The bottom has fallen out of the hospitality market with the global recession affecting the number of tickets sold by Match, the company that bought the rights to resell an estimated 380,000 such tickets through a network of agents.
It will only break even on the 2010 tournament, a spokesman admitted yesterday: "The global recession and perceived security concerns have had a detrimental effect on demand. However, we remain on course to fulfil a hospitality programme of similar scope and magnitude to that of 2006 and most certainly far larger than that of 2002."
The recession has also impacted on the accredited travel agents and unofficial touts who may be left holding fistfuls of unwanted tickets. No one knows just how many of these remain unsold with less than two months to go before the opening match between South Africa and Mexico.
Fifa has admitted that a "significant" number of tickets have been returned by official sponsors and partners to be resold to the general public, but argues that this is standard practice. The situation is complex. The doomsday scenario of hundreds of millions of TV viewers tuning in to see embarrassing swathes of empty seats is unlikely to materialise. But Fifa sources acknowledge that tickets are likely to be on sale for some matches right up until the day of the game.
Almost 1m tickets have now been sold to domestic buyers (compared to the 800,000 that had been sold to Germans at the same stage in 2006) and sales picked up as excitement mounted following the draw in December, allaying earlier fears that South Africans would be outnumbered in their own stadiums. "We started off slowly but South Africa has now warmed to the event," Danny Jordaan, chief executive of the South African 2010 organising committee, said yesterday. "We have the Football Friday where we ask people to wear the national team jersey and you can't find one of those shirts in any store in the country. That's just one example of the way people are getting enthused."
But there remain fears that the World Cup will not reach the vast majority of South Africans because prices remain too high. Fifa argues that the cheapest tickets cost less than in Germany in 2006, that it has met a pledge to reserve 25% of tickets, all in the cheapest category, for domestic buyers and has listened to concerns over the way they are sold.
But the reality is that those in the game's South African heartlands in townships such as Soweto, in the shadow of the impressive bowl of Soccer City, and Khayelitsha, a few miles from the gleaming Green Point stadium in Cape Town that was this week hailed as one of the five best in the world by South Africa's manager, Carlos Parreira, will not get anywhere near a match.
At 140 rand (£12.40), even the cheapest tickets for group games are beyond the reach of many people in a country where the average monthly wage is estimated at just over 2,700 rand and tickets for a Premier League match typically costs 20 rand. Among the black population, who make up by far the majority at matches, the monthly average wage is 1,620 rand.
To watch South Africa play Mexico on 11 June, a local supporter will have to pay 490 rand for the cheapest ticket. Tickets for the final range from 1,050 to 6,300 rand.
The way in which tickets have been sold in the four phases to date, via an internet ballot, has been criticised and Fifa has only belatedly adjusted its selling techniques to take account of low internet and credit card penetration in the host country.
Jérôme Valcke, the Fifa general secretary responsible for the World Cup, admitted as much when asked if mistakes had been made. "Yes, definitely. The approach at the beginning by using internet and by using computers was not the most friendly system for the South Africans."
Fifa has moved from denial to grudging acceptance that some mistakes have been made, via an attempt to lash out at the media – with some justification – for scaremongering. Last week, Valcke admitted that European sales had been "disappointing" and suggested that perhaps Europeans had become blasé about football. In contrast, interest is higher than usual from the USA and Mexico. "Maybe we are getting too much [football]. We are getting whatever we want. We have football matches every day. Either the Champions League or the Europa League or the club league or the cups." The importance of those South Africans who can afford the more unattractive group matches has increased as it has emerged that visitors from the rest of the world simply will not travel in the hoped for numbers. Original hopes that 450,000 – including up to 50,000 England fans – would travel have proved optimistic. Valcke now predicts that up to 350,000 will come.
He has raged against the British and German media for overplaying security fears. However, prices have been a bigger concern than safety for some European fans. Jordaan has manfully wrestled with the issue, calling again and again on the tourist industry and airlines not to seek short term gain at the expense of a potential long term growth in tourism.
But England fans still complain of sky high prices and complex logistical challenges in, for example, travelling from Rustenburg, where England will start against the US, to Cape Town, where they will play their second group match.
South Africa's tourism ministry Marthinus van Schalkwyk has ordered a probe into allegations that hotel prices are unreasonably high, just one month after the Competition Commission began examining similar claims about airline fares.
And for all the rhetoric about this being not just South Africa's World Cup but the whole of the continent's, supporters from the five other African qualifiers will be underrepresented. The culture of not buying tickets in advance is a factor but it was not until a few months before the tournament that organisers began to tackle the other underlying causes – not least the fact that to get to South Africa from most other cities on the continent you have to fly via Europe at huge expense. In recent weeks, Fifa has toured Africa to drum up interest and raise awareness of travel options.
Valcke has already admitted that Fifa's experiences with the 2010 World Cup would lead to a rethink of its ticketing strategy for the 2014 tournament in Brazil. Fifa will sell more tickets directly and give fewer to travel agents, and will open its own ticketing centres and apply a "different and more flexible approach" to the way they are sold.
In the carefully calibrated world of Fifa-speak, that can be interpreted as an admission that the attempt to have its cake and eat it by taking the World Cup to a developing country and promising a host of legacy benefits while also selling hospitality packages to the rest of the world at high prices has backfired. There are no financial repercussions for Fifa, though – it has already banked a record $3.2bn from pre-selling the marketing and TV rights and Match has already paid handsomely for the right to resell hospitality. The local organising committee, which must make its money from selling tickets and from a Fifa contribution, had already broken even at $423m (£273m) by last month.
Match is understood to have also broken even and hopes the global economy, and Brazil's emergence as an economic powerhouse, will help it do better in 2014. None of which will quell the debate over whether the sales could have been better structured to reach more genuine fans and the amount that the South African government has poured into building stadiums and improving infrastructure. "If we have empty stadiums, it will reinforce the idea that football is not supported in the country and that would be tragic," Jordaan said. "The reality is that this is a football-mad country."
Jordaan, who has battled against the odds for 16 years to deliver a South African World Cup, has delighted in proving the naysayers wrong and is not about to stop now. He is convinced that his countrymen will rush to the new ticketing centres and find the money to snap up the remaining tickets as excitement builds. The success of the tournament – and all that a host of others from South Africa's president, Jacob Zuma, to the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, have invested in it – could depend on it.
www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/apr/15/south-africa-world-cup-tickets
South Africa's World Cup success hangs on one last push to sell tickets
Today is a crucial day as Fifa-accredited ticket booths across the country begin trying to shift 500,000 tickets to locals
Of all the staging posts that have marked the progress towards Africa's first World Cup, today's could be one of the most significant in deciding its fate. This morning Fifa-accredited ticket booths in the centre of the nine host cities and a network of supermarkets across the country will open for business and begin trying to shift the 500,000 tickets that remain on a first come, first served basis.
That represents almost a fifth of the 2.7m available, with tickets remaining for all 64 games including the final at Soccer City. In all, just over 3m tickets were released, but demand from Europe has been lower than expected.
The bottom has fallen out of the hospitality market with the global recession affecting the number of tickets sold by Match, the company that bought the rights to resell an estimated 380,000 such tickets through a network of agents.
It will only break even on the 2010 tournament, a spokesman admitted yesterday: "The global recession and perceived security concerns have had a detrimental effect on demand. However, we remain on course to fulfil a hospitality programme of similar scope and magnitude to that of 2006 and most certainly far larger than that of 2002."
The recession has also impacted on the accredited travel agents and unofficial touts who may be left holding fistfuls of unwanted tickets. No one knows just how many of these remain unsold with less than two months to go before the opening match between South Africa and Mexico.
Fifa has admitted that a "significant" number of tickets have been returned by official sponsors and partners to be resold to the general public, but argues that this is standard practice. The situation is complex. The doomsday scenario of hundreds of millions of TV viewers tuning in to see embarrassing swathes of empty seats is unlikely to materialise. But Fifa sources acknowledge that tickets are likely to be on sale for some matches right up until the day of the game.
Almost 1m tickets have now been sold to domestic buyers (compared to the 800,000 that had been sold to Germans at the same stage in 2006) and sales picked up as excitement mounted following the draw in December, allaying earlier fears that South Africans would be outnumbered in their own stadiums. "We started off slowly but South Africa has now warmed to the event," Danny Jordaan, chief executive of the South African 2010 organising committee, said yesterday. "We have the Football Friday where we ask people to wear the national team jersey and you can't find one of those shirts in any store in the country. That's just one example of the way people are getting enthused."
But there remain fears that the World Cup will not reach the vast majority of South Africans because prices remain too high. Fifa argues that the cheapest tickets cost less than in Germany in 2006, that it has met a pledge to reserve 25% of tickets, all in the cheapest category, for domestic buyers and has listened to concerns over the way they are sold.
But the reality is that those in the game's South African heartlands in townships such as Soweto, in the shadow of the impressive bowl of Soccer City, and Khayelitsha, a few miles from the gleaming Green Point stadium in Cape Town that was this week hailed as one of the five best in the world by South Africa's manager, Carlos Parreira, will not get anywhere near a match.
At 140 rand (£12.40), even the cheapest tickets for group games are beyond the reach of many people in a country where the average monthly wage is estimated at just over 2,700 rand and tickets for a Premier League match typically costs 20 rand. Among the black population, who make up by far the majority at matches, the monthly average wage is 1,620 rand.
To watch South Africa play Mexico on 11 June, a local supporter will have to pay 490 rand for the cheapest ticket. Tickets for the final range from 1,050 to 6,300 rand.
The way in which tickets have been sold in the four phases to date, via an internet ballot, has been criticised and Fifa has only belatedly adjusted its selling techniques to take account of low internet and credit card penetration in the host country.
Jérôme Valcke, the Fifa general secretary responsible for the World Cup, admitted as much when asked if mistakes had been made. "Yes, definitely. The approach at the beginning by using internet and by using computers was not the most friendly system for the South Africans."
Fifa has moved from denial to grudging acceptance that some mistakes have been made, via an attempt to lash out at the media – with some justification – for scaremongering. Last week, Valcke admitted that European sales had been "disappointing" and suggested that perhaps Europeans had become blasé about football. In contrast, interest is higher than usual from the USA and Mexico. "Maybe we are getting too much [football]. We are getting whatever we want. We have football matches every day. Either the Champions League or the Europa League or the club league or the cups." The importance of those South Africans who can afford the more unattractive group matches has increased as it has emerged that visitors from the rest of the world simply will not travel in the hoped for numbers. Original hopes that 450,000 – including up to 50,000 England fans – would travel have proved optimistic. Valcke now predicts that up to 350,000 will come.
He has raged against the British and German media for overplaying security fears. However, prices have been a bigger concern than safety for some European fans. Jordaan has manfully wrestled with the issue, calling again and again on the tourist industry and airlines not to seek short term gain at the expense of a potential long term growth in tourism.
But England fans still complain of sky high prices and complex logistical challenges in, for example, travelling from Rustenburg, where England will start against the US, to Cape Town, where they will play their second group match.
South Africa's tourism ministry Marthinus van Schalkwyk has ordered a probe into allegations that hotel prices are unreasonably high, just one month after the Competition Commission began examining similar claims about airline fares.
And for all the rhetoric about this being not just South Africa's World Cup but the whole of the continent's, supporters from the five other African qualifiers will be underrepresented. The culture of not buying tickets in advance is a factor but it was not until a few months before the tournament that organisers began to tackle the other underlying causes – not least the fact that to get to South Africa from most other cities on the continent you have to fly via Europe at huge expense. In recent weeks, Fifa has toured Africa to drum up interest and raise awareness of travel options.
Valcke has already admitted that Fifa's experiences with the 2010 World Cup would lead to a rethink of its ticketing strategy for the 2014 tournament in Brazil. Fifa will sell more tickets directly and give fewer to travel agents, and will open its own ticketing centres and apply a "different and more flexible approach" to the way they are sold.
In the carefully calibrated world of Fifa-speak, that can be interpreted as an admission that the attempt to have its cake and eat it by taking the World Cup to a developing country and promising a host of legacy benefits while also selling hospitality packages to the rest of the world at high prices has backfired. There are no financial repercussions for Fifa, though – it has already banked a record $3.2bn from pre-selling the marketing and TV rights and Match has already paid handsomely for the right to resell hospitality. The local organising committee, which must make its money from selling tickets and from a Fifa contribution, had already broken even at $423m (£273m) by last month.
Match is understood to have also broken even and hopes the global economy, and Brazil's emergence as an economic powerhouse, will help it do better in 2014. None of which will quell the debate over whether the sales could have been better structured to reach more genuine fans and the amount that the South African government has poured into building stadiums and improving infrastructure. "If we have empty stadiums, it will reinforce the idea that football is not supported in the country and that would be tragic," Jordaan said. "The reality is that this is a football-mad country."
Jordaan, who has battled against the odds for 16 years to deliver a South African World Cup, has delighted in proving the naysayers wrong and is not about to stop now. He is convinced that his countrymen will rush to the new ticketing centres and find the money to snap up the remaining tickets as excitement builds. The success of the tournament – and all that a host of others from South Africa's president, Jacob Zuma, to the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, have invested in it – could depend on it.
www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/apr/15/south-africa-world-cup-tickets