Fans fume at latest screen test failure
By Kaveh Solhekol (Times Online)
MILLIONS of football fans worldwide were cursing their computer screens yesterday when the official World Cup website crashed as soon as it started to sell tickets for the finals in Germany this summer.
Sales of the 62,000 remaining tickets for the 64 matches taking place between June 9 and July 9 were to start at 11am, but fifaworldcup2006.com was creaking under the pressure of the traffic that it had attracted an hour before kick-off.
A spokesman for the organising committee in Frankfurt admitted at noon that the website was experiencing “technical difficulties” but would not go into any more detail. “We do not know what the problems are,” he said, “but we are working on fixing them and that should be done in the next few minutes.”
At 11am, tickets had been offered for sale for 31 matches, including the opening match between Germany and Costa Rica and Brazil v Australia, Italy v Ghana and France v South Korea, but attempts to pay for the tickets, that cost between €45 (about £31) and €100, were met with a white screen and an obscure message informing despairing customers that an error had occurred.
The problem had not been fixed two hours later, when a polite message appeared on the screen advising fans to “try again later”, but by 4pm the website was available only in German and all tickets had been sold. The organising committee is advising fans to keep checking the website until April 15 because more tickets may become available, but none were on sale at 9pm last night.
No one from the organising committee was willing to make any more comments about the events of yesterday, but Jon Russell, the commercial director of LB Icon, an internet consultancy based in London, said that poor planning and overwhelming demand could have contributed to the problems.
“There is no reason why a website cannot cope with a huge amount of traffic,” Russell said. “The secret is to plan properly and estimate well. Maybe they thought they would get a million users, bought capacity for two million and got ten million.”
According to Russell, the problem was exacerbated because the website did not tell its customers what the problem was and therefore encouraged them to keep trying to buy tickets when they had no chance of completing their transactions.
“If a website is going to fail, it should fail gracefully,” Russell said. “If there had been a simple message straight away telling users to try again later, there would probably have been less of a problem.
For England supporters desperate to get their hands on tickets to watch Sven-Göran Eriksson’s swansong as head coach, yesterday’s disappointment was the latest in a long line of obstacles that they have faced in their attempts to obtain tickets for the three group B matches, against Paraguay, Sweden and Trinidad & Tobago.
More than 100,000 England supporters are expected to travel to Germany, but according to Kevin Miles, the international co-ordinator for the Football Supporters’ Federation, only 48 per cent of the 3.07 million tickets available for the tournament have been sold to fans.
“The biggest quibble that most supporters have is with the third of tickets that are going to hospitality packages,” Miles said. “Add that to all the tickets being distributed by the national associations of countries that didn’t qualify and you can see where all the blackmarket tickets will come from.
“England will be the bestrepresented country in terms of visiting supporters in Germany because they are also one of the teams that neutral supporters love to watch and these two factors combined explain the extremely high demand for England tickets.”
