If you believed the promotional propaganda, the global soccer extravaganza next month was supposed to be “Africa’s World Cup,” a glorification of the whole African continent, not just the host country. Even its official slogan urged the fans to “celebrate Africa’s humanity.”
Today the organizers are admitting that those dreams were overblown. The African connection looks more like a marketing gimmick than a reality. Of the nearly three million tickets made available for the World Cup, only about 40,000 have been sold so far to Africans who live outside South Africa, the host country.
“It’s true that it’s a bit disappointing,” said Jerome Valcke, secretary general of FIFA, the governing body for world soccer, at a press briefing in Johannesburg Thursday. “It’s poor. It’s really not a lot of tickets when you think that we have so many African countries playing in the World Cup.”
He acknowledged that FIFA will have to “rethink” its ticketing system for the next World Cup, which will be held in 2014 in Brazil, another developing country. Ticket prices should perhaps have been reduced in Africa, he said.
“The system we have put in place was not perfect for South Africa and for Africa,” he told the briefing. “We have to work on all the ticketing policies from scratch for 2014, because I agree that it could be that we are facing the same kind of situation in Brazil as in South Africa.”
This year’s World Cup, which kicks off June 11 at the spectacular Soccer City stadium in Soweto, is the first to be held on African soil. For a long time, FIFA assumed that this history-making fact would provide enough drama to drive the ticket sales.
But now it’s become increasingly obvious that FIFA made three big errors in its ticketing system this year. It attempted to sell all of the three million tickets by credit card to fans on the Internet, despite the fact that most Africans don’t have credit cards and don’t have Internet access. It also refused to offer discounted ticket prices to anyone outside South Africa, forcing soccer fans from impoverished African countries to pay at least $80 a ticket, a massive amount of money for most Africans. And it forgot that the transportation links within Africa are expensive and time-consuming, creating another barrier for African soccer fans.
The Internet ticketing system was a “huge mistake” this year, according to South African tourism minister Marthinus Van Schalkwyk. He gave an even smaller estimate of the number of Africans buying tickets outside South Africa so far – just 11,300 by his count, which he said was 76 per cent below the predicted number. For many Africans, the ticket prices were “unaffordable,” he said.
When it became clear that the ticket sales were too slow, FIFA finally caved in and allowed tickets to be sold the traditional way, over the counter, at ticket booths that were hastily set up around South Africa. This triggered a flood of purchases, and FIFA now estimates that more than 90 per cent of the available tickets have been sold, including more than a million tickets sold to South Africans. It’s aiming to reach 95 per cent by the time the World Cup begins next month.
To help fill any empty seats in the stadiums, FIFA will hire buses to bring soccer fans across the border from neighbouring countries such as Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
One issue for many visiting soccer fans is the danger of violent crime or even terrorism in South Africa. A Saudi man who was recently arrested in Iraq, allegedly a member of al-Qaeda, told reporters that he had planned a terrorist attack in South Africa during the World Cup. But the threat was dismissed by Valcke, who said the intelligence services have not received any information about a “real” threat to the World Cup.
