Fifa president Sepp Blatter is confident the World Cup 2010 stadiums will be ready on time, and the workers building them will get a bonus if they don’t go on strike again.
Also, local fans discovered on Saturday they will get cheap and even free tickets to the games.
In fact, the only people missing out on the eve of Sunday’s World Cup draw appear to be the English. Having already missed out on the European Championship, they now find it will be even harder to get to World Cup 2010.
After South Africa was chosen to host the 2010 championship, work on constructing or renovating 10 stadiums began so slowly that there were strong fears they might not be finished in time. A strike earlier this month held up construction of the Moses Mabhiba Stadium in Durban and union leaders threatened similar disruption at the other nine sites.
Blatter, who visited the Durban stadium on Saturday, said a bonus system has now resolved the dispute and he is convinced that all the grounds will be ready ahead of schedule.
”We are not only confident but we are sure that all the construction will be ready for the 2010 World Cup,” Blatter told reporters on Saturday. ”To be transparent, we may not get everything right that we want to have ready for the Confederations Cup 2009, but there are enough stadiums available.”
Local organisers also announced that many of the tickets sold for the 64 games will go at cheap prices to local fans, most of whom cannot afford the regular World Cup rates. The cheapest at last year’s championship in Germany cost $51 (about R345), while up to 20% of the tickets sold for the group games in South Africa will be as low as about R135.
Some will even be free. Organisers are working out a system of distributing 120 000 complimentary tickets, which also will only go to local fans.
Danny Jordaan, CEO of the local organising committee who has been pushing South Africa’s World Cup cause for more than a decade, said he hopes the cheap ”category four” tickets don’t fall into the wrong hands through scalpers.
”If someone is sitting there with these tickets in an England shirt or a Belgian shirt, that will be so because something has gone wrong,” he said. ”That will defeat the purpose of category-four tickets.”
Blatter’s stadium visit came on the eve of the draw at Durban’s International Convention Centre, where England will be fearing the worst.
Having failed to qualify for Euro 2008 in Austria and Switzerland, England found that their Fifa world ranking slipped a spot to 12th because of Wednesday’s 3-2 loss at home to Croatia, the result that spelled elimination from next year’s tournament.
That meant they had fallen behind nine other European teams and lost a place among those who will be seeded in the draw — Italy, Spain, Germany, Czech Republic, France, Portugal, The Netherlands, Croatia and Greece.
England will face one of those teams in the draw — maybe Croatia again — and, with only the group winners sure to qualify, England could find themselves among the eight runners up-who go to the play-offs or missing out on World Cup 2010 as well.
The 53 European teams will be split into eight qualifying groups of six and one of five, with 13 teams eventually advancing.
The United States are one of the top three seeds in qualifying from Concacaf, along with Mexico and Costa Rica. Australia, South Korea, Iran, Japan and Saudi Arabia are the top five seeds in the Asia confederation.
Because only 10 teams are involved, there is no draw in South American qualifying, which has already started with five-time World Cup winners Brazil and Argentina already among the front runners after four rounds of games.
As hosts of the World Cup, South Africa do not have to qualify. But Bafana Bafana will still be in Sunday’s draw, since the African round also doubles up as qualifying for next year’s Cup of Nations in Ghana.
Like England, South Africa has slipped out of the top tier of rankings, however, and could wind up playing against the likes of Cameroon, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Morocco, Ghana and Tunisia. — Sapa-AP