The first of five sales periods ended on 31 March. As expected, the number of requests far exceeded the 812,000 tickets on offer. The tickets will now be allocated by ballot on 15 April.

The ballot takes place at FIFA World Cup Ticketing Center (FWCTC) headquarters in Frankfurt. "Obviously, our priority is to guarantee every applicant has an equal chance of success," observed 2006 FIFA World Cup OC senior vice-president Horst R. Schmidt. Inspections agency T?V Rhineland has assessed and certified the procedure to be used, while the ballot will be personally supervised by a qualified official of the state of Hesse.

The ballot opens with match 1, category 1 ? or more specifically, the Opening Match on 9 June 2006 in Munich, in the most expensive of the four price categories. Applications will be drawn match-by-match and category-by-category until the tickets for all 64 matches have been allocated. The draw for Team Specific Tickets follows.

The ballot promises to be a genuine marathon with up to 1,000 individual draw procedures, potentially taking more than 24 hours. The 'winners' will be notified of the number and category of tickets allocated by the end of April 2005. Precise seat and row numbers will be assigned by the OC at a later date. The tickets will be despatched six to eight weeks ahead of the tournament.

'Losers' who gave an e-mail address will also be notified of the outcome by the end of the month. More than 95 percent of the applications were submitted over the internet. Notification will not be given to applicants whose orders could not be processed due to incorrect or incomplete submissions.

OC officials say the first sales phase has easily met expectations. Commented Horst R. Schmidt: "Not surprisingly, the Opening Match, the Final and the semi-finals were the most sought-after. But we're delighted that the remaining games appear to have attracted an almost identical level of demand, even in advance of anyone knowing the fixture list. The fans are captivated by the prospect of living and breathing a World Cup at first hand and personally experiencing the unique atmosphere."

No technical issues arose in the course of the first phase. "The system coped superbly with the avalanche of orders in the first 12 hours and the high demand over the last few days, when we observed another dramatic increase in activity. Two and a half million tickets were ordered without any issues at all on the final day," Schmidt continued.

Orders exceeded the number of available tickets for every single one of the 64 matches. "That's the only fly in the ointment. We knew we'd be forced to disappoint a host of committed supporters, but even if we'd had three times the number of tickets, we'd have fallen well short of fulfilling everyone's wishes. We just want to encourage the fans to have another go in the remaining sales periods," Horst R. Schmidt added.

The first of the four remaining sales phases runs from May to November 2005, offering exclusively Team Specific Tickets. Individual match tickets go back on sale in the third phase, provisionally set for 1 December 2005 to 15 January 2006. "We'll be offering another 200-300,000 individual tickets at that time," Schmidt remarked.

from FIFA.com