The Mystery of the “Missing Tickets”

I’m sure most of you have noticed that there are empty seats at most of The World Cup games, the number of open seats can range from just a few (last night a Soccer City for the Brazil v Côte d’Ivoire game) to a whole lot of open seats (think and game at PE).

The reason behind all the open seats in Port Elizabeth is pretty obvious, PE is kak far away from any of the other major centers in South Africa and (lets not beat around the bush here) its a bit of a hole. I was actually chatting to a ticketing agent from MATCH the other day and they estimated that if they moved all the games up from PE just a week before kick-off they would have sold more tickets. But sadly there is nothing we can do about the except for heading off to PE to watch some games! (run people run!)

Now for the exciting stuff (did I say exciting? Sorry…) There are without a doubt open seats at many if not all of the games at all the big stadiums such as, Soccer City, Cape Town Stadium and Ellis Park, even the amazing Moses Mabhida Stadium (Durban Stadium) had a worrying amount of open seats. What you might be saying right now is: “So what? People didn’t want to goto the games, big deal they are expensive.” Now I want you to go tell that to all of the people who where unable to get tickets because the stadium was “Sold Out” or because their ticket application was denied.

So whats happening to the tickets you ask?

First let me explain  what I’ve been up to these holidays that has allowed me to figure a thing or two about FIFA and MATCH out…

I’m currently working for an English “Tour Operator” and as far as I can tell he knows EVERYONE that has anything even remotely to do with FIFA and The World Cup. My job is to drive him wherever and whenever as well as whatever odd jobs he needs done (fetching tickets, I haven’t stood in a single line, or picking up buss passes, the under sale of MATCH hospitality packages is a whole other story!). Being around him all this time means I spend a lot of time listening to his conversations with all the big wigs.

So back to the tickets…

Basically in December last year when the draw took place, the entire world was gripped by football/world cup fever and many tour operators (who pay a premium to have access to large amounts of tickets) snapped up a huge amount of tickets to whatever games they could, about half of all the tickets to the world cup are sold like this.

This normally would not have been a problem as they would have been able to sell all the tickets that they bought, but a combination of The Recession and “The Icelandic Volcano that no one actually knows the name of”, interest in the world cup, as well as any other international travel waned.

This left our dear tour operators with a bit of a problem, reselling of tickets is illegal (they are ment to “sell” the tickets as part of packages) but there was still a demand in South Africa for just about any tickets. This led to a mad rush to get rid of all their extra tickets, and because they could not go through their normal/legal channels, they couldn’t even get the cost price of the tickets.

So in a nutshell(after a lot of waffling, sorry again…) although they have done a great job at getting most of those tickets back on the market, there are inevitable some that could not be sold and thus we have the empty seats in what are essentially sold out stadiums.

So if you see a foreigner wallpapering the side of his hotel with match tickets, you know he was one of the few responsible for the empty seats.