World Cup ticket agency defends its record despite empty suites in stadiums

WCup ticket agency defends its work

JOHANNESBURG — The agency that has exclusive World Cup ticketing rights is defending its work in South Africa while acknowledging “we are going to make a loss” because of empty suites in tournament stadiums.

“It’s no secret we are going to make a loss,” MATCH director Jaime Byrom told The Associated Press, declining to specify the deficit. “The important thing to understand is that we are meeting our obligations.”

Byrom said MATCH should be judged on its overall ticketing service, which eventually saw 97 percent of ordinary seats sold, if not occupied at games. Those sales generated revenue for South Africa’s local organizing committee that “generously surpassed” expectations.

MATCH’s contract with FIFA, for this tournament and Brazil 2014, called for it to be the “agent in the sale of all tickets to all ticket customers.” It also had to meet the needs FIFA’s commercial partners before focusing on the profitable part of its business model — hospitality clients.

“We certainly don’t feel that the results of 2010 can be faulted,” Byrom said.

The problem for MATCH was that its corporate hospitality subsidiary never recovered from launching its sales program in September 2008 during the global banking crisis.

“We could have picked a better moment, let’s put it this way,” said Byrom, a Mexican who runs the family business with brother, Enrique, from bases in England and Switzerland. Its Swiss partner is the Infront agency whose chief executive is Philippe Blatter, a nephew of FIFA president Sepp Blatter.

Byrom believes the economic downturn won’t last, and that MATCH Hospitality will recover the rest of the $120 million it paid FIFA for a two-tournament deal in Brazil.

“It’s a game of two halves,” said Byrom, who is expecting to make a profit in the end. “I am not that humble. I want to be able to make a profit, a sufficiently large profit in 2014 to make up for our losses in 2010.”

Byrom spoke Wednesday at MATCH’s offices in a sleek business complex in the high-end Sandton suburb of Johannesburg.

During the interview, he only once acknowledged a television showing Switzerland’s stunning upset of Spain in Durban that completed the first set of group-stage matches.

“That’s nice. That’s what I look at, when I look at a match,” Byrom said, referring to a ground-level camera shot framing the action against the towering — and packed — grandstands at Moses Madhiba Stadium.

“I don’t look so much at what’s going on on the pitch, but the terraces.”

The full stadium for the early match was not typical. Four of the first 16 matches played to at least 10,000 empty seats.

Byrom said those were daytime kickoffs featuring “not particularly exciting” teams playing in provincial cities.

Attendance figures have confused fans who were told by FIFA that, after a difficult 18-month sales program, the World Cup kicked off with almost all the 2.9 million tickets sold.

A sophisticated ordering and distribution system means MATCH knows who has failed to turn up — if not always why.

Many are South African residents who didn’t use discounted seats sold to local businesses and government departments after international sales fell below expectations.

Byrom said some overseas fans, who paid between $80 and $160 for a group game, didn’t travel to South Africa where their tickets awaited collection.

“This World Cup is not within walking distance of half the participating teams,” he said, citing the differences compared to the 2006 World Cup, which was staged in Germany and happier economic times.

Without having an actual ticket, stay-at-home fans could not sell them on to a friend, scalper or another agency not licensed by FIFA — eliminating the so-called secondary market.