Fifa’s disastrous ticketing system has let down Women’s World Cup

Tickets for the Champions League final between Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur were so rare and in demand they were changing hands for upwards of £20,000 on the streets and plazas of Madrid.

Walk up to a ticket kiosk anywhere in France for a match at one of the mainly unfilled Women’s World Cup stadiums and you would be hard-pressed to find an official who could hand one over for 10 times that.

At a time when the stock of the women’s game has not been higher and people in the UK have tuned in by the millions to watch Phil Neville’s England side, Fifa have let the movement down with a disastrous ticketing system and a comically bad approach to PR.

Fans not sat next to each other

Warning signs were sounded back in May, when fans began complaining that they had paid for tickets in pairs or groups, only to discover that when they were assigned, they were not sat with friends and family. Fifa’s response to the many complaints? It was in the small print.

“When you placed your order, a message indicating not all seats would be located next to each other did appear, before confirmation of your purchase,” an official statement said. “Unfortunately we will not be able to modify your order.”

An exception could be made, they added, if people weren’t sat next to their children. Could! Not definitely. Good luck to whoever found themselves separated from friends or family and sat next to someone else’s toddler.

Panic sales tactics – gone wrong

Next, the official Fifa Women’s World Cup Twitter account, followed by almost 800,000 people, thought it was a good idea to try to make out that the tickets were far more difficult to come by than they actually were. “You can still buy tickets for a few matches,” they said, later in May. Hurry! Quick! Get them before they’re gone!

Invoking panic is a familiar sales tactic used widely across the internet for booking hotels and spa breaks or buying something: it’s almost sold out, quick, this is your last chance, there are two rooms left and a hundred people looking at them, DO IT NOW. Only for you to check back six hours later and discover that there are still two rooms left and a hundred people looking at them.

The problem there, as someone who stays in hotels for work for an unhealthy amount of nights of the year, is that it’s pretty hard to tell how full a hotel is when you stay, unless you go knocking on all all 10 floors of doors (something I would not recommend).

In a stadium, on the other hand, it’s pretty easy to tell how many people there are, and a few days into the tournament Fifa were forced into the embarrassing revelation that only 20 of the 52 matches were actually sold out. That came from their president, Gianni Infantino. Turned out he wasn’t telling the truth, either, when the figure was revised to 14 later on.

Bums on seats

Did someone in Fifa’s PR department hand responsibility for the Women’s World Cup to an intern on their summer holiday from university?

The way to avoid negative PR around ticket sales is not to pretend that people are buying them and then spend the tournament in bed with the duvet pulled over your head, but to devise schemes to shift them: offer special deals for families, give them away free or cut-price to schools, offer OAPs a reduced rate.

But that didn’t happen. So loads of tickets are available, you’re in France and fancy taking in a game, so why not turn up and pay on the door? Well, Fifa won’t let you do that, either. People have even reported attempts to buy tickets en route to less than half-full stadiums and being unable to due to the payment system.

“The crowds have been really disappointing,” Manchester United manager Casey Stoney said last week. “I don’t think the organisers did enough to market the tournament – in some of the cities you would not know the Women’s World Cup was on until you get to the stadium.”

So it’s a real shame that England’s last 16 game against Cameroon in Valenciennes on Sunday is not expected to be sold out, even though the millions who will be watching back home would struggle to buy a ticket, even if they tried.