ZURICH/RIO DE JANEIRO: A total of 889,305 tickets were allocated to fans from 188 countries in the draw for the first phase of ticket sales for next year’s World Cup finals in Brazil.

Some 71.5pc were sold to Brazilian residents and thus 28.5pc went to fans from abroad.

A FIFA statement said: “Out of all tickets made available for sale, in compliance with the General World Cup Bill (LEI Nº 12.663, Lei Copa),  FIFA offered a total of 342,740 tickets in category 4 to fans resident in Brazil, with priority given to students, individuals over the age of 60 and participants of the federal social welfare programme.

“As demand from the priority groups was less than the available inventory, 216,618 tickets went to those entitled for discounts in Brazil. All applicants for the 6.2 million requested tickets will be informed by 10 November 2013 at the latest whether they have been successful or not, either by e-mail or SMS.”

Outside the host country Brazil (625,276 tickets), the highest number of tickets drawn was for residents of the United States (66,646), followed by England (22,257), Germany (18,019), Australia (15,401), Canada (13,507), France (11,628), Colombia (11,326), Switzerland (8,082), Japan (5,021) and Argentina (4,493).

Popular packages

The most popular venue-specific series ticket packages were for Rio de Janeiro (94,500), Brasilia (48,540) and São Paulo (46,916).

The draw was supervised by Caixa Econômica Federal and the Brazilian Ministry of Sports, as well as a public notary, and held in Manchester, England.

This is by far the highest number of tickets to be allocated during a first sales window. For the 2006 finals, out of the 8m requests received, 652,521 were successful in obtaining tickets, and in 2010, out of 1.8 million requests, 381,559 tickets were granted. Each applicant was able to apply for a maximum of four tickets per household per match and for a maximum of seven matches only.

Thierry Weil, FIFA Marketing Director in charge of ticketing, said: “The whole draw procedure worked smoothly. Of course, we would have liked to please even more football fans at this stage, but there will be other ticket sales windows, with the next one starting in less than a week. By using the electronic random selection draw, we were able to guarantee that the whole procedure remained fair and all applicants had an equal chance. This is very important to us.”

The next sales window will start again exclusively via FIFA.com on November 11 at 12.00 CET/09.00 BRT (Brasilia time), and will remain open until 28 November at 12.00 CET/09.00 BRT.

About 228,959 tickets will be available on a first-come first-served basis. It is expected that the tickets will be sold very quickly. No further tickets will be available in this sales window for the opening match in São Paulo, the final in Maracanã, Brazil’s group-stage matches and the round of 16 in Belo Horizonte as well as the two semi-final matches in Belo Horizonte and São Paulo, which were the most highly oversubscribed games.

Further tickets for all 64 matches will be made available after the Final Draw when the second sales phase will kick off on 8 December 2013, once the final match schedule for the group stage matches is known.

Further information: www.FIFA.com/tickets.

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