By giving away tickets to the Confederations Cup, Fifa is admitting that the tickets are actually overpriced. I have to say I’m more than a little peeved by this because it means I’ve been duped into paying a lot more for something than it’s actually worth. It’s like seeing a sweater you paid full price for going for 75% off at a Woolies end-of-season sale.
But I can’t say I’m entirely surprised. You have to ask what planet Fifa was on when it decided on venues and pricing structures for the Confed Cup. Even the cheapest tickets prices are out of the range of the ordinary South African, and some venues are just too far away from the major cities to draw people who have more disposable income.
My husband and I both have good jobs and we could barely afford to buy the tickets we did get — first round, category two tickets. When we watched Italy play the US at Loftus on Monday we were sitting off-centre up in the nosebleeds, row ZZ, surrounded by foreigners and affluent locals. We would have loved to have gotten better seats, but any closer to the centre line or the pitch itself, and the ticket prices would have doubled — not an option even for us.
I would love to go to Bloemfontein to watch Spain play Italy or Brazil — there’s no doubt that match will be a cracker. But Bloemfontein is a five-hour drive from Johannesburg. To attend the match my husband and I would have to take two days of leave just to get there and back. Then we’d have to book overnight accommodation, and we’d also have to factor in food and petrol costs. Why is anybody even surprised that there are hardly any tickets sold to this match?
This is really a case of Fifa officials sitting in their ivory towers, completely out of touch with the lives of ordinary South Africans.
If Fifa really wanted to see full stadiums at the Confed Cup, they should have nixed Rustenburg and Bloemfontein in favour of Cape Town and Durban, and they should have charged less for tickets in all categories.
If neither of these was an option, they should have recognised well in advance that ticket sales would be a problem and preemptively handed out tickets to charities and the like. This would have seemed generous. Now it just seems like admitting to failure.