Fans scramble for 1m World Cup football tickets

It was a frenzied start to Fifa’s attempt to fill the stands for next year’s World Cup in Brazil as fans applied for more than one million tickets in just seven hours.

But it will be some time before they know whether they will be among those lucky enough to get seats to football’s signature event.

Applicants will not hear back until October, after Fifa, football’s governing body, holds a random selection draw on all the requests.

More than 163,000 people requested the tickets online in the first seven hours yesterday. At the end of the first day, there had been more ticket applications than the number of seats available in all four price categories for 12 of the 64 matches, including the opener in Sao Paulo and the final at Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana Stadium.

Demand was also high in all price categories for the semi-finals, and 44 matches had too many requests for the cheaper category tickets only available for Brazilians.

Fifa said the highest amount of applications has come from Brazil, Argentina, the US, Chile, and England.

“The respective ticket product is already heavily oversubscribed and therefore, at that point in time, the success of the application appears very unlikely,” Fifa said of the high demand categories. “There are vastly more ticket applicants seeking tickets than there are tickets presently available for the general public.”

Prices for the final will go from $440-$990 (€330-€740), although Brazilian fans will pay $165 in the cheaper category.

About 500,000 tickets in total were set aside for the category available solely to Brazilian citizens.

Applications quickly started pouring in after tickets went up for grabs. Some fans had to be placed in a virtual queue “due to an exceedingly high demand for access to the ticketing page,” Fifa said on its website.

Fifa’s press office said that in the first hour of sales there were 14,104 requests for a total of 81,821 tickets. Each applicant can request up to four tickets for a maximum of seven matches.

The organisation expects a total of nearly 3.3m tickets to be available for the tournament in Brazil, but only about 1m are offered in the first stage of sales.

Fifa said before sales opened that it expected a demand for tickets similar to that seen for the 2006 World Cup in Germany, when there were about seven applicants for every ticket of the month-long tournament attended by more than 3.3m fans.

#WorldCup TICKET SALES UPDATE: More than 2.3 million ticket requests have now been made in the first 24 hours. pic.twitter.com/6WLl8DwgVs

— FIFA (@FIFAcom) August 21, 2013