There is a situation that could pour cold water on the excitement surrounding the World Cup. More than anything else, the situation surrounding ticket sales is particularly serious. During the opening match last Friday, somewhere around three thousand seats in one section were completely empty, and on Saturday at the game in Ulsan between Denmark and Uruguay, as many as ten thousand seats out of a total of 44,000 were empty as well.

It is most unfortunate that, unlike the excitement outside the stadium, the matches have seemed vacant. It is even more disturbing when you realize the reason is that the tickets for these seats were not even sold, thanks to mismanagement by the British ticket sales company Byrom.

Byrom is a company that has consistently been something of a problem, being late in ticket distribution and issuing more than one ticket for the same slot. It was already "guilty" of putting the domestic hotel industry in a hard place by unilaterally returning at the end of April as much as 70% of the hotel rooms it had secured, a mere month before the opening of the event.

Even more of a problem is that Korea, as the host country, gets handed the losses for Byrom's blunders. The organizing committee's income from ticket sales is an immediate problem, and the hotel industry is forced to engage in "dumping" room space, an embarrassing miss when it comes to all those promises about a boom market during the World Cup.

FIFA is finally saying it is going to investigate what went wrong, but it needs to bear responsibility for contracting a company that was not qualified for the task. For the sake of a successful conclusion to the World Cup, FIFA must show sincerity in finding what went wrong and doing something to correct what has happened.

June 3, 2002