Another Take on Ticket Situation

The version of the story that appeared in the Johannesburg Times is more interested in which tickets aren't sold, rather than how many.

And this may be the more interesting way to look at this.

Instead of focusing on the "800,000 of 2.9 million tickets haven't been sold," the AP version of the story that the Times ran singles out a dropoff in VIP-level tickets.

And the demand for those is half of what Fifa and organizers expected.

Not selling the expensive tickets is an issue because the profit margin is so much higher, as the story points out.

A Fifa spokesman blamed it on the economy, saying the past year "was the worst year to sell hospitality programs," suggesting it impacted sales by 50 percent. But the AP writer also makes note of the important point of the cost of getting to South Africa for the 2010 World Cup, and the cost of staying there. "Price gouging" is the expression. Plus, fears that South Africa isn't safe.

Oh, and another stat I'm not sure the London Telegraph story we linked to yesterday had:

Jerome Valcke, Fifa's man, suggested that South Africa will get perhaps 350,000 tourists instead of the 450,000 it expected.

So we stand by our suggestion yesterday that the prices for housing (especially) and air travel may be about to take a dive.

Hang tight. Wait for the bargain. A gap of 100,000 fans opens up a lot of seats on jumbo jets, and a lot of hotel rooms. Read more!

Oops! Fifa Concedes 2010 Ticket Gaffes

Fifa and South Africa and some of those in the travel industry clearly overestimated the global demand for high-priced tickets as part of high-priced trips to the 2010 World Cup.

Fifa's first clue? Beyond the quite-public grousing by officials in several countries ... and the sticker shock expressed by just about every fan who priced the trip ...

Fifa's first clue? Less than four months ahead of South Africa 2010, only 2.1 million of 2.9 million tickets have been sold for the planet's biggest sports event. That is, more than one-fourth of all tickets (27.4 percent) remain unsold.

And now Fifa concedes it didn't quite get this right. A startling admission for an entity that rarely allows that it gets anything less than perfect.

The biggest fallout from these miscalculations: Fifa is going to all but give away 800,000 or so tickets to South Africans. Which is nice for the poor people of South Africa, but bad for the bottom line of the ledgers for Fifa, the organizers and the South African tourist industry.

This event was overpriced from the first day. And then when fans actually began to try to figure out how much travel and lodging would cost ... ticket demand fell dramatically.

I don't know how many tickets Germans eventually bought, but a month or so again they had purchased only about one-third of their allotment of 20,000-plus tickets.

Even England didn't buy its full allotment, and English enthusiasm for its national side is as crazy-giddy as it has been in years. Well, since at least 2006.

Instead of reacting to that flabby demand, and adjusting ticket prices downward (and allowing the travel market to adjust its unrealistic expectations, as well) ... Fifa is going to downgrade high-cost "category 2 and 3" tickets to "category 4" -- and sell them for about $20 each.

Fifa lives in terror of stadiums that are not full, especially when the host nation has just spent billions on building them. It looks bad on TV, too, when matches are played in half-empty stadiums. (And will South Africans pay even $20 a pop to see, say, Honduras and Chile? ... New Zealand and Paraguay? ... North Korea and Portugal?)

How Fifa and the organizers miscalculated so badly is puzzling. South Africa isn't geographically close to any of the usual sources of traveling soccer fans. That is, Europeans or Americans (North and South). It is a long, expensive flight to South Africa from anywhere in the First World, and Fifa had to know that South Africa's hotel industry would try to wring every last dollar/peso/pound out of the tourists, complicating the expense in the middle of a global economic slowdown.

Now?

Look for the resale price of tickets to plummet, now that more than a quarter of them have just been re-priced at something that seems rather like "free" to residents of the First World ... and watch for airline prices and hotel charges to fall off a cliff. Because 800,000 fewer foreigners are coming to town, and now we all know.

If you happen to hold tickets ... well, our condolences for buying at the higher prices ... but if you haven't yet purchased your plane ticket or booked your hotel ... wait at least a few weeks and let the panic set in.

Look for a massive shakeout of the tourism side of this, and far better prices than you could have hoped for even a few days ago.

Fifa just burst the overpriced balloon of financial expectations on this World Cup.

It now is about filling stadiums and saving face. Not about making money, anymore. At least not a fraction of what Sepp Blatter and the boys could have counted on flowing in ... had this event been held in the First World. Or had they done a realistic assessment of likely demand.

Rather a mess. Rather. Read more!

England's Heir and Spare to See SA2010

Wills and Harry are coming! Wills and Harry are coming!

Sigh.

Don't you always get a bit embarrassed when people from countries without native royalty ... get all weak in the knees over the British royals?

South Africa may be about to demonstrate this.

The Johannesburg Times is reporting, and attributing it to The Daily Mail, that princes William and Harry will be in South Africa for at least part of the 2010 World Cup.

Be still, my beating heart!

William and Harry are Nos. 2-3 on the in-line-to-the-throne list, behind their father, Prince Charles. (Their mother was Diana Spencer, who died in an automobile crash in Paris in 1997.)

Wills' and Harry's proximity to the throne (even a powerless one) seems to get people fired up. People who have forgotten they are anti-royal republicans or democrats or comrades, etc.

Anyway, I suppose this is good for the 2010 World Cup. A bit more buzz with those guys around for however long it is.

They apparently will see England play at least once. Imagine how fired up the English players will be knowing the Heir and the Spare (as they were once known) are watching. Yeah.

William turns 29 during the World Cup. Henry (Harry's actual name) is 25.

The two of them apparently are sharing a house, and they generally don't travel together, and why I'm still writing about this, I don't know.
Read more!

Guus Hiddink: Out of World Cup Circulation

Nigeria has an opening for a coach. Japan might. North Korea might.

All we know for sure about those three jobs is this:

Guss Hiddink won't be taking them.

Hiddink is the planet's leading soccer-coach hired gun. Have passport, will travel. (And yes, I know that expression means nothing to non-Americans under the age of 50. It comes from an old American TV show, named "Have Gun-- Will Travel" and having to do with a gunslinger known as "Paladin" who would go wherever the pay was good.)

Guus is like that. A "show me the money" kind of guy. (Another American cultural reference. From the movie "Jerry Maguire..")

Anyway, Guus is golden after getting Holland to the 1998 World Cup semifinals, South Korea to the 2002 WC semifinals and Australia to the second round in 2006. Not to mention the Euro 2008 semifinal surge by Guus and his Russia team.

He will not, however, be coaching at South Africa 2010, and I'm a little disappointed in him because of that.

Guus apparently will sign a contract with Turkey when his stint with Russia is up, later this year. Which is fine ... but Turkey didn't qualify for the 2010 World Cup, and I think SA2010 is diminished by his not being there.

Really, this story is more about Euro 2012 than the 2010 World Cup. Well, of course. Hiddink's first goal is to get Turkey qualified for the big Euro event, after Turkey crashed out of South Africa qualifying.

I liked the concept of Guus as free agent. I would have like to see him in charge of Nigeria's talented but underachieving squad. Or Japan's or North Korea's -- if those jobs come open.

But Guus is living up to his Russia contract, then shifting to Turkey, and that's nice for those who like to see contracts fulfilled ... but takes away a little of the cachet when it comes to "who will Nigeria hire?" to coach its 2010 team.

Some other Euro, no doubt. Just not someone as successful as Guus has been.
Read more!

Pressure Even on Teams with No Chance

Japan is not going to win the 2010 World Cup. Just isn't going to happen. We could add another 15 countries here who Have No Chance, and take it to Las Vegas and bet it and collect in early July. All of Asia, all of North America, the lesser Euros, South America aside from Brazil ...

Anyway, wouldn't you think that the federations in those countries would remember that ... every minute of every day ... and give their coaches just a bit of wiggle room?

That is not the case in Japan. No-chance Japan. Which is getting increasingly agitated by the Blue Samurai (never heard that one, till today) and their lack of scoring punch of late.

Coach Takeshi Okada appears to be in danger of losing his job, even though it's getting quite late to change coaches in time for SA2010.

Tying China, which has a federation in crisis, isn't good. Getting "only" three goals against Hong Kong, which probably couldn't beat some street teams in Brazil, doesn't help.

But, c'mon, people. Japan is not going to win this World Cup. It would be a miracle if it survived the first round. Netherlands, Cameroon, Denmark ... any soccer fan who doesn't have a rising sun flying over his house already has marked Japan for last in that group.

So, if Okada has a decent history, and is a good guy, and at some not-too-distant point in history (like, during qualifying last year) seemed to know what he was doing ... just ride it out. It's late. Bringing in somebody at the 11th hour ... that's difficult.

Anyway, the point here is ... even the no-chancers feel pressure from fans and media and respond to it.

Maybe they're all thinking, "Guus Hiddink is still available!" Read more!

Club vs Country, Spanish Style

We have noted the neverending club-vs.-country struggle.

It is particularly intense during two of the four years of a quadrennium -- the year before a World Cup, when qualifying is going on; and the first half of the year the World Cup is played in.

And we are in the middle of example No. 2, above, with South Africa 2010 less than four months off.

Here is a rather bald example of the club-country thing, involving Spain and its coach, Vicente del Bosque, and Liverpool of the English Premier League.

Generally, it is the clubs that are more vociferous about how a player is used. As when Real Madrid almost went nuts when Cristiano Ronaldo seriously aggravated an ankle injury while Portugal was trying to wring out a few minutes from him in a crucial qualifier last fall. When Ronaldo got hurt, Real Madrid essentially shouted, "We told you so!"

This time, it's the national team coach who is being blunt.

Del Bosque tells it like it is: The less that star striker Fernando Torres plays for Liverpool, his club team, the better.

In this case, we have a specific injury at issue, involving his knee. (The hernia situation apparently has been put on hold; Torres seems a bit fragile for such a young guy.)

Anyway, del Bosque probably sums up the feelings of national coaches around the world -- at least, those going to the World Cup -- when it comes to his star players: Better that they miss a few (or more than a few) matches with an injury, as long as it's not catastrophic, and save on the wear and tear of the endless matches of the club season.

If the guy is a lesser player -- say, any U.S. player who isn't one of its 4-5 stars -- a national team coach such as Bob Bradley actually wants him competing for his club as often as possible. The idea being that he stays sharp (before he grows dull from over-usage). When you're the coach of second-tier national teams, you worry more about your First XI sitting on a bench somewhere, watching the club play.

That isn't the case with your Torreses and Ronaldos and Messis. They are proven stars. All that can come from the club season -- from the national team perspective -- is injuries and exhaustion.

It's just not often that a coach is as candid about it as del Bosque has been about Fernando Torres. Read more!

Bafana Plan ... Do They Have One?

One of the more interesting sports writers in South Africa is Carlos Amato, who works for the Johannesburg Times.

And Amato is agitated about the way the host nation's team is preparing for the World Cup. Or hardly preparing.

In this story/column, he contrasts South Africa's preparations with those of Mexico, the nation the Bafana Bafana plays in the 2010 World Cup opener on June 11.

Most of his complaints seem well-founded.

To wit:

--South Africa has only one practice (friendly) match scheduled between now and June 11, vs. Namibia on March 3. No matches during the team's training camp in Brazil have been finalized. Neither have any been set up during the team's camp in Germany, in April.

--South Africa's schedule may be a function of the soccer federation having no money.

--The Bafana made things worse by cancelling a March 3 match against Chile, a South American side that will play in the World Cup, and had to pay Chile damages for quitting. The reason? South Africa's third-rate league season has been extended because of rainouts, and the Bafana players would not be available.

--Honduras plays Ghana in South Africa on March 3 -- yes, the same day that South Africa plays Namibia. As the author notes, either Honduras or Ghana would give South African a much more valuable test.

Meanwhile, Amato notes, Mexico has 10 matches lined up against significant opponents, including Argentina, England and Holland in May, and Italy on June 3. All four are headed to the World Cup, and all four are seeded first in their groups.

South Africa already was at risk of being the first host country to fail to survive group play. And unless the federation lines up some real opponents, and soon, about all it will have going for it on opening day, June 11, will be the home crowd.

Which may not matter if/when the veteran and tested Mexican side jumps to a 2-0 lead. Read more!