World Cup Ticket Screw Up Could Screw VIPs

Oops. According to a report in the Monday edition of the German newspaper Sddeutsche Zeitung, hundreds of thousands of VIPs could be denied entrance to World Cup matches because their names have not been printed on their tickets. For months I have been reading that the World Cup tickets must include the ticket holder’s name, but apparently that message was not heard by the company hired by FIFA to oversee commercial sales of tickets.

The company, a Swiss agency called ISE, says the German organizing committee only informed them of this requirement a month ago and that it is too late to track down the names of the VIPs and to put them on the tickets.

The German organizing committee replied that this is utter nonsense, saying that these requirements have been known from the beginning and printed everywhere included websites like World Cup Blog.

I give the organizing committee some credit for sticking to its guns and trying to enforce its policies for everyone even though I don’t think these policies are going to work in practice.

I find it hard to believe that the ticketing company overlooked this detail. While I have absolutely no proof that this is true, my wildly speculative guess is that some of the organizations receiving VIP tickets didn’t want names printed on their tickets because they were eager to resell them at greatly inflated prices without having to go through FIFA’s official ticket transfer system.

How else can you explain the number of tickets that are being sold by touts all over the Internet? Where do you think they get their tickets? Couldn’t possibly be from the corporate sponsors and football federation officials now, or could it?

After all, these are the same people who want to get their hands on your personal information.

While the image of corporate fat cats and FIFA lackeys being denied entrance at the stadium gates is a delightful one, I have a hard time believing it will actually happen. We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on the stadium entrance process on June 9 in Munich to see if everyone will be required to show an ID and if people are denied entrance.