Worried organisers may give away free tickets

World Cup organisers may give away free tickets to groups of schoolchildren or young footballers to avoid the spectacle of thousands of empty seats at matches.

As FIFA struggles to come to grips with ticketing problems at the tournament, organisers have been embarrassed by television pictures showing some stadiums little more than half-full.

Although many of the empty seats in the stadium are due to poor ticket sales on the international market, another problem is that the FIFA website where tickets can be bought has been overwhelmed by hits and continually crashes.

In addition, there are no ticketing centres in the Japanese cities of Sapporo and Ibaraki, so anyone living would have to travel to another city to pick up their tickets, diminishing local appeal to attend games.

FIFA are to arrange a crisis meeting in the next 24 hours in a bid to solve the ticket problems.

Che-min Rim, spokesman for the Korean organising committee, said: ‘‘We need to have a detailed discussion with FIFA about how to manage the empty seats, and whether we can give them to children, high school footballers, servicemen or volunteers.’’

Rim added that although local demand for seats had been good, there had been less take-up internationally.

Less than 1,000 tickets were sold in Spain before the World Cup, while for yesterday’s Paraguay v South Africa match in Busan the attendance was 32,300 in a 53,800-capacity stadium, and only 22% of tickets available to those countries had been sold.

Furthermore, 7,000 seats were left empty deliberately because of a poor view - the existence of a running track means the first few rows are left vacant - but 87% of the local ticket allocation was sold.

FIFA communications director Keith Cooper said: ‘‘The ticketing co-ordinator from FIFA, John Doviken, has travelled to Japan with the intention of co-ordinating four-party discussions within the next 24 hours if possible.

‘‘But we have to be realistic about this, there have been plenty of World Cup matches in the past where matches were not sold out. Some matches are more attractive than others.’’

The talks will take place between Doviken, representatives from Korea and Japan, plus someone from British-based ticketing agency Byrom.

Japanese organisers have attempted to put the blame onto FIFA for empty seats.

Spokesman Yukiko Koike said: ‘‘We were told that unsold overseas tickets would be sent to us for sale in Japan, so we were regret that they were not.’’

The Korean and Japanese governments have also become involved in the row.

In Seoul, Korean government spokesman Shin Jung-Sik told local reporters: ‘‘KOWOC is considering a strong protest to FIFA and Byrom as well as a possible damages suit against Byrom.’’

In Japan, chief cabinet secretary Yasuo Fukuda told a news conference: ‘‘It is very regrettable that many people cannot get into stadiums. We hope firm measures will be taken.’’