In order to ensure the Brazilian authorities’ involvement in supervising the procedures for the allocation of tickets following the first sales period, as per the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil Bill, FIFA has had to postpone the draw, which will only start today (Tuesday, 29 October 2013). Due to this delay in the process, it will not be possible to inform all the applicants for the over 6.2 million tickets requested if they have been successful or not by the previously communicated deadline of 4 November 2013.
As such, FIFA has decided to postpone the start of the next sales period from the original date of 5 November to 11 November 2013, starting at 12.00 CET/09.00 Brasilia time.
“As the next sales period is on a first-come, first-served basis, it is essential that all those applicants for tickets from the first period have been informed on the status of their application by the time we reopen sales,” explained Thierry Weil, FIFA’s Director of Marketing. “We cannot risk any fan not being aware of his/her success before we put the remaining tickets on the market. Obviously, our priority is to ensure every applicant has an equal chance of success.”
The second period of the first sales phase will end on 28 November at 12:00 CET/09:00 Brasilia time.
The electronic lottery is taking place in Manchester in the presence of representatives from the Caixa Econômica Federal and the Brazilian Ministry of Sports, as well as a public notary. During the initial part of the randomly selected draw, all ticket applications received from those applicants who qualify for priority access, as per the 2014 FIFA World Cup Bill – namely elderly people, students and members of the Bolsa Familia –, will be drawn against the more than 300,000 category 4 tickets reserved for these applicants.
Subsequent steps in the draw will allocate the remaining category 4 tickets as well as the other tickets in all other categories on a match-by-match basis. The draw for team specific tickets will then follow. The ballot promises to be a genuine marathon, with up to 1,000 individual draw procedures potentially taking more than 24 hours.
All applicants will be informed by e-mail or SMS on whether or not their application was successful by 10 November 2013 at the latest. A total of about one million tickets are available in the two sales periods of the first sales phase. Once the lottery has been completed, FIFA will announce how many of the one million tickets remain available for sale between 11 to 28 November.
Weil said: “We know we’ll be forced to disappoint a host of committed supporters, but even if we’d had three times the number of tickets, we’d still have fallen well short of fulfilling everyone’s wishes. We’d just like to encourage the fans to have another go in the remaining sales phases.”
FIFA would like to take this opportunity to reiterate that FIFA.com is the only sales platform for tickets for Brazil 2014. Any ticket products being offered by other companies or on other platforms are not part of or related to the official ticket sales programme. FIFA has not appointed any company to be its agent for the sale of match tickets. Supporters are strongly recommended not to buy tickets through other channels.
Source: Fifa.com