The company that is the ultimate cause behind the ¡°empty seat situation,¡± a British company by the name of Byrom, contracted for ticket sales by FIFA, is now claiming that the Korean and Japanese organizing committees are responsible. The Korean organizing committee¡¯s response is that the claims are utterly baseless. It means that one side or the other is lying, a situation that shouldn¡¯t be part of a massive international event, more to be expected at some neighborhood playing field.
Ever since the location of this year¡¯s World Cup was decided we¡¯ve been spending years on the preparations. Then with a month left before the event 70% of hotel reservations were canceled, and at the opening events, you saw an unprecedented situation in which there were spots around the stadium that were completely unoccupied.
The organizing committee cites Byrom¡¯s unprofessional handling of the job, and says it is going to sue FIFA for its losses, since it was FIFA that selected Byron to do all the ticketing. Now Byron has come up with a real unexpected new claim, namely that it only got the seating arrangements from Korea¡¯s organizing committee in March of this year, when it was supposed to have them six months before the event.
The amount in question in damages is something for later, and for now the fundamental issue is which side is telling the truth. The organizing committee says it gave Byrom all the documentation it needed within the deadlines, and that the company even performed an inspection. We would like to be able to believe the version of events explained by the Korean organizing committee.
The general view within football circles around the world is that the responsibility lies with Byrom, but with the situation as it is, figuring out how things went wrong is a task that cannot be avoided. The organizing committee will of course have to prove everything as in the coming lawsuit, and if it is proven that Byrom was in the wrong, it must do its best to recover the material and psychological losses.
June 9, 2002
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