Fifa’s Google Translate gaffe leaves Women’s World Cup fans mystified

Fifa’s disastrous handling of ticketing for the Women’s World Cup has been further revealed after i was told they responded to an enquiry by copying and pasting a stock French answer into Google Translate to produce a barely legible reply.

Fifa has already faced complaints about their inability to sit supporters who bought tickets in groups next to each other and the refusal to allow people to turn up and buy tickets at stadiums with empty seats.

The PR campaign that suggested only few tickets were still available in the weeks before the tournament kicked off also backfired when masses of empty seats greeted the first games. Fifa eventually announced that only 14 of the 52 matches were sold out.

‘Such a weird system’

One supporter, Ruth Evans, contacted i to share details of Fifa’s obstructive approach to ticket sales. Evans wrote to Fifa via the Women’s World Cup website in January asking if she could buy tickets for individual stadiums rather than the three-match packages that were the only available option at the time.

Evans was planning on holidaying in the north of France and taking in a couple of games with her partner, but did not want to purchase so many tickets. She has previously bought tickets for the men’s France 1998 and Germany 2006 World Cups and Euro 2016, also in France.

“We have never experienced such a weird system of buying tickets,” Evans told i on Monday. “We had been planning to spend a few days in the north of France going to one or two matches at particular stadiums rather than watching particular teams, but abandoned the idea because the tickets were on sale so late. We had no problems at all with the ticketing process [for the men’s tournaments]. For all these matches, our interest was in buying tickets for a particular day and venue rather than supporting a particular team, which was what this year’s ticketing process [for the Women’s World Cup] seemed to be based on.

‘Crazy’

“[It] does not do the image of women’s football any good. I just about figured out from their email that individual match tickets wouldn’t go on sale again until March this year. The ‘package’ idea was crazy in the first place if they wanted women’s football to reach as wide an audience as possible.”

Fifa’s response to the query, forwarded to i, included confusing sentences such as: “The ticket office is totally dematerialized, orders are made exclusively on the website ticketing section (creating personal space). The categories and availabilities are current ones in just-in-time.”

Another passage read: “The express mode: allows the acquisition seats by default via the network (contiguous, centered seats and centered and closed to the field according of order validations and depending on availability and categories).”

Evans forwarded Fifa’s response to the Football Association, which told her: “From looking at the email sent from Fifa and from speaking to Fifa representatives, the email you received was a stock response translated directly from French to English.”

Fifa declined to comment.