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World Cup Football 2006 Germany: More than 10 million tickets
ordered in first sales phase
OUR SPORTS CORRESPONDENT
April 5, 2005: The World Cup Football 2006 in
Germany is still over a year away, but football fans have
already requested in excess of ten million for the 2006 FIFA
World Cup match tickets in the first sales phase, according
to preliminary figures released on April 1.
"This impressive total underlines the extraordinary level of
interest in football all over the globe. We've received
applications from 195 different countries. I can't remember a
World Cup attracting anything like this kind of demand in such
a short space of time," commented FIFA General Secretary Urs
Linsi. More than 80 per cent of the football ticket applicants
live in Europe, with 90 per cent of these coming from Germany.
 The
first of five sales periods ended on 31 March. As expected,
the number of requests far exceeded the 812,000 tickets on
offer. The World Cup Football 2006 tickets will be allocated
by ballot on April 15.
The ballot takes place at FIFA World Cup Ticketing Center (FWCTC)
headquarters in Frankfurt. "Obviously, our priority is to
guarantee every applicant has an equal chance of success,"
observed 2006 FIFA World Cup OC senior vice-president Horst R
Schmidt. Inspections agency TÜV Rhineland has assessed and
certified the procedure to be used, while the football ballot
will be personally supervised by a qualified official of the
state of Hesse.
Orders exceeded the number of available tickets for every
single one of the 64 matches. However, there are still four
more sales phases. The first runs from May to November 2005,
offering exclusively Team Specific Tickets. Individual
football match tickets go back on sale in the third phase,
provisionally set for 1 December 2005 to 15 January 2006.
OUR SPORTS CORRESPONDENT
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