What Happens if Nobody Shows Up to Watch the World Cup?

The World Cup  is less than six months away and organizers are running into a bit of a problem.

What happens if nobody shows up?

There are two reasons for the slow sales of World Cup tickets: safety and price.

Sepp Blatter and FIFA insist that South Africa’s violent crime rate is not a problem. This week I have read articles by Martin Samuel from the Daily Mail  and Andrew Jennings from 243next.com . Both talk about how unsafe it is to walk outside a hotel.

As Jennings wrote:

"One ticket broker told me of his surprise last month in Cape Town for the Final Draw when staff at his hotel begged him not go out for a healthy stroll. 'Many fans have heard these stories already and decided to stay home to watch on television,' he said. 'And now the attack on the Togo team in Angola is going to make a bad situation worse.'"

Three of the biggest European footballing nations are England , Holland , and Germany and they are all struggling to sell their tickets.

On Eurofootball.biz they wrote:

"DFB, the German Football Federation, has sold 1,000 of its allocated 21,000 tickets for the three group games scheduled against Australia, Ghana and Serbia. The Dutch association is said to have sold 2,000-3,000 tickets of its targeted 10000 and has requested a deadline extension from FIFA. The Dutch and English fans are traditionally the ones who travel in large contingents with their teams and this has prompted Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung to wonder, “If the three federations known for fans who like travelling (with their teams) have such problems what does it look like for Paraguay, Serbia or Honduras?” Germany has had around 25,000 orders in the first five phases of ticket sales for the 64 matches totally."

And it is not just the European fans who are not buying tickets. According to EUTicketNews :

"Even African fans are refusing to buy. 2010 chief executive Danny Jordaan has been forced to admit, 'Less that 100,000 tickets have been sold to fans in the six African countries competing in the Finals.' Jordaan added, 'This will be the first time in World Cup history that the host nation is not topping the ticket sales list.'"

FIFA and South African organizers where planning on about 450,000 football fans traveling to South Africa for the World Cup. Now that number looks like being between 125,000 and 150,000 and could be a financial disaster for South Africa.

They might be forced to give aways tickets to some of the group stage games to ensure that they are not played in an empty stadium