Today was the start of the last-minute phase of the sale of World Cup tickets. Having miserably failed to get near any tickets in the previous phases, I logged on early to see if I could get hold of tickets. Due to the time difference (I am in beautiful El Salvador), I did not log on at 2 AM Russia time, when the tickets went on sale in my region, but still tried to log on in the morning, only to get this message:
Fair enough, I was expecting some difficulties, so I started to wait...
I finally managed to log on. It was clearly crowded, as tickets were quickly disappearing, and for the matches I prioritized I kept getting the message:
So I will be going to the World Cup, even though I will attend a match that I am not really interested in, in a place that can only surprise me positively because outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, I have no knowledge or expectations about Russia. (I would be happy about any first-hand recommendations about Rostov-on-Don).
All these difficulties made me wonder whether tickets really are unavailable. On FIFA's website you can read that tickets are only to be purchased through FIFA:
Fair enough. I accept this, and this is also why I have done everything totally legit. However, surfing the net you can find plenty of sites offering tickets:
There is even a site comparing prices for the tickets:
These are
not sites I found on the dark net: you can simply google them! FIFA
knows well that they exist, but this does apparently not prevent the
sites from openly (and transparently) selling the tickets.
Prices are generally higher than on FIFA, but they are not unattainable. The tickets seem legit, which means firstly, that they have had some way of hoarding these tickets through the FIFA site (which already requires some skills that an idiot like me doesn't have, since I was not even able to get a single ticket) and secondly that these sites, guaranteeing money back, must be pretty sure that FIFA's warning about not obtaining tickets outside their site is a largely hollow warning. These sites must be estimating that only a fraction of purchasers will be denied entry, opening up for a pretty nice margin for doing something that FIFA does not allow (I think that part of the speculation is that FIFA probably fears empty seats more). And conveniently, the burden is on the person who buys the tickets; a football fan who tried in vain on the FIFA site, only to be intimidated for paying more for a ticket that otherwise seems to be widely available.
All this said I am a naive and honest idiot: I am not so adventurous as to venture into one of these sites to get to the World Cup, even though I know plenty of fans will probably do it with no consequences. Honesty doesn't pay.
In the end, I find that all this leads to more questions about the ticketing for the World Cup: how do these sites get their tickets? How does FIFA allow it? How many people would get in through purchasing tickets on these sites? (I would love to hear if you are one!) Who is making the money...?
