ENGLAND football supporters received good news yesterday, when the organisers of this summer’s World Cup finals in Germany announced that 5,300 extra tickets would be made available for the group B matches against Paraguay, Sweden and Trinidad & Tobago.
The national associations of the 32 countries taking part in the tournament had until today to tell the organising committee in Frankfurt whether they would be taking up their full allocations for their group matches and the majority of the extra tickets are believed to have come from the 18,000 that were set aside for distribution by the national associations of Paraguay and Trinidad & Tobago.
These will be sold by the FA to members of englandfans, the official England supporters’ club, and will not be available for general sale. The announcement means that the FA will have a total of 14,000 tickets for the three group matches.
“This is great news for England fans and the result of intensive lobbying by the FA,” Brian Barwick, the FA chief executive, said. “The England team enjoys unrivalled travelling support and we were determined to do everything we could to increase our allocation.” Although membership of englandfans is capped at 25,000, the FA has been allocated an average of less than 5,000 tickets for each of the group matches.
There was mixed news for non-members who had applied for tickets at the official World Cup website. An electronic ballot was held last week to determine which applications for the 300,000 tickets that were up for grabs in December and January were successful. In all, 677,900 fans had made six million ticket applications and most received this blunt e-mail from the organising committee.
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“Due to the high demand for tickets for the 2006 Fifa World Cup Germany, the ticket applications correctly processed and accepted had to be entered into a draw. Unfortunately, you have not been allocated any tickets for the 2006 Fifa World Cup Germany. You may of course reapply in one of the subsequent sales phases.”
The organising committee has announced that 470,000 tickets, including some for England games, will be made available next Wednesday.