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SPORTS | MARCH 16, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 11 |
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The Invasion Of France The host country's neighbors are angered by its distribution of tickets for this summer's World Cup By WENDELL STEAVENSON /LONDON
It was inevitable the French Organizing Committee (C.F.O.) would face a logistical nightmare. The four-week competition brings together 32 teams for 64 matches in 10 cities, with 2.5 million seats available for hordes of football fans whose appetite for tickets is voracious. Mike Burton, who runs a sports travel agency in Gloucestershire, says he's "never known demand like there is for the World Cup." Six countries, Italy, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Spain and England--all strong football nations with reasonable chances for reaching the semifinals--are a mere day's drive from many of the stadiums. But ticket supply is limited. Unlike the 1994 World Cup in the U.S., where huge stadiums allowed for 3.5 million tickets despite fewer teams competing, most of the venues in France--with the exception of the gleaming new 80,000-seat Stade de France--have an average capacity of not much more than 40,000. There are always disappointed fans at big events like the World Cup and the Olympics, and there will always be pre-emptive naysaying. But the perception that the French system of ticket distribution is both too complicated and too French has produced a crescendo of nationalist outrage. From the C.F.O.'s point of view, the task of ticket allocation is fraught with counterbalancing considerations. Despite the World Cup's global viewing figures of more than a billion, certain matches, like Chile-Cameroon or Jamaica-Japan, do not inspire the overwhelming interest of traveling fans as much as the contest between Holland and Belgium. But while encouraging the sale of tickets to the less glamorous matches, care must be taken to avoid indiscriminate sales for the more popular ones. The sport has a reputation for violence; fans with faces covered in grease paint, waving flags and singing football songs with warlike lyrics, need to be segregated and monitored. The ticketing system the organizers came up with was approved by FIFA, the governing body of world football, and does not greatly differ from previous World Cups. It's the execution of the details that arouses protest and confusion. Some 60% of available seats were reserved for those with a residential address in France, and a total of 1.27 million were sold in "blind" packages for certain venues even before it was determined which teams would be playing in which cities. Corporate packages required companies to purchase a block of tickets for preliminary matches in order to qualify for the right to buy a seat at the final. At the end of the distribution, the numbers left over for each national football federation to distribute to their fans were pitifully small, a mere 8% of capacity at any given match. The Belgian Federation recorded 120,000 requests for tickets to their first round match against Holland in the Stade de France; they got just 5,200. Said Guido de Windt, spokesman for the Belgian Football Federation: "I would not call this a World Cup for fans of national team soccer. It's more like a World Cup for the rich. Or the French." Into the storm of protest waded the European Competition Commissioner, Karel van Miert, who declared that the ticket allocation system amounted to indirect discrimination in favor of French residents and was in contravention of Article 86 of the E.C. Treaty. FIFA, along with the C.F.O., had to respond. Two weeks ago they found an extra 152,000 tickets--apparently a reserve batch--and are now in the process of deciding who to give them to. But FIFA spokesman Keith Cooper, fed up with continued criticism from across the English Channel, reportedly warned that if the English Football Association continued to complain, they would find the English bid to host the World Cup in 2006 undermined. The argument had boiled over, sour and political. "Relative demand" will be taken into consideration in deciding who will receive the new ticket allocation, but so will security arrangements and stadium configuration. That means thousands of fans, with no hope for a legitimate ticket, inevitably will try to find illegitimate ones or travel to France with no tickets at all and spend their time carousing, drinking and wreaking mayhem in city centers. Warns de Windt: "I wouldn't be surprised if you saw a lot of Belgian fans coming over to France without tickets during play to voice their anger over the situation." Hoping to avoid such ugliness, French officials visited England last week to review the low-key policing policy that kept the European Championships in 1996 relatively trouble-free. They'll be happy if the Battle of France 98 can be confined to the playing field. --With reporting by Bruce Crumley /Paris
HOW THE TICKETS WERE CARVED UP 20% Allocated to FIFA to divide among the national football federations, VIPs, press and other hangers-on 7% Sponsors 8% Tour operators 5% French municipal authorities 60% Residents of France Source: For ticket graph stats
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he quirks of nationalism are never so obvious as in the stands
of a football stadium, where ancient rivalries divide fans into
warring tribes. In Europe historical fissures run deep; not even
recent strides towards economic unity have prevented an
internecine spat over tickets for the World Cup in France this
summer. Everyone's furious that the French have kept most of the
seats for themselves.