Last chance to apply for World Cup tickets

The fourth ticket phase of ticket sales running for 58 days until 7 April 2010 — is the last phase where fans will be able to apply for tickets to the first FIFA World Cup tournament to be held on African soil. Phase five will run from 15 April to 11 June 2010 and in the last-minute sales phase, application forms will not be used; instead, tickets may be bought in real time, subject to subject to availability. Fans will be able to buy tickets on the FIFA website and for those in South Africa, through the branches of First National Bank.

Finally, if there are still any tickets left over after the phase five, these will be sold in a “last minute” round of sales running from 15 April to 11 July 2010. In a statement, FIFA said the third phase of ticket sales closed on 22 January with more than 1.2 million tickets requested by fans from all over the world. The world soccer controlling body said: The third ticketing sales phase for the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa was finally concluded last Friday (January 22). The 2010 FIFA World Cup ticketing centre has ensured that the maximum number of available tickets has been included in the random selection draw for the general public. Extensive validation of the results of the random selection draw process has been conducted in order to ensure the FIFA Sales Regulations have been adhered to.

According to FIFA, a total of 1 206 865 tickets have been requested from 192 countries by the general public (excluding those tickets that have been sold through the participating teams to their fans). Of this total, 585 175 tickets were drawn successfully, and 413 072 (70,6 percent) of those were allocated to South African residents. Outside the host country, the United States received the highest number of tickets drawn (35 262), followed by the United Kingdom (21 614), Mexico (11 893), Australia (11 804), Germany (9 692), Brazil (5 891), Canada (4 642), France (4 268) and Israel (3 677). In Africa, Botswana remains the leading country behind the hosts, with a total of 1 587 tickets drawn, followed by Mozambique (1 142). Kenya completes the top three African countries with 785 tickets, FIFA said from Switzerland .

FIFA said with regard to individual match tickets, category 4 was the most popular and the final received the highest number of applications. All applicants will be informed via e-mail or SMS whether they were completely or partially successful by next Monday. South Africa will host the event from June 11-July 11.