Mundial FRANCE 98 – Comunicados de Prensa

Paris, 19 December 1997

Ticketing for the Big Matches: The Draw has spoken!

This morning, Friday 19 December, the French Organising Committee carried out a match-by-match draw determining the order of priority for allocating the seats requested by the general public resident in France for the 9 big matches in the World Cup, namely the opening match, the quarter-finals, the semi-finals, the third-place play-off and the Final.

As a result of the draw, supervised by a legal officer, 170,000 tickets have now been allocated for all these 9 matches.

37,000 other tickets may be allocated before the end of March 1998, likewise following the order of priority determined by the draw.

“The seats represented by these tickets are at present in reserve,” explain Michel Platini and Fernand Sastre, Presidents of the CFO. They add, “They will be allocated little by little as we know more about whether the wire fencing will be kept up or taken down, the installation of back-up security systems, the final seat-count where seats have not actually been installed yet, the final configuration of the structures set up in the press stands, and so on.”

In total, the draw concerned 207,000 tickets. This figure is less than the initial figure quoted by the CFO as it was finally decided to accord French sporting organisations, particularly those involving football, 20,000 tickets for the 9 matches.

Around 1,043,000 ticket requests for the 9 matches were registered by the French Organising Committee between 18 September and 18 October this year. Reservations were open to everyone, by Minitel, telephone, or mail using the application forms available in the 8,300 branches of Crédit Agricole, Official Bank to FRANCE 98.

A draw match by match

Fernand Sastre and Michel Platini settled on the principle of deciding the ticket allocation by a draw, in the interests of fairness.

The draw, which lasted three hours, was made possible through the know-how of the Committee’s technological partners, EDS, Hewlett Packard and Sybase.

The draw was conducted under the supervision of Maître Delattre, a Parisian Legal Officer, and took place in four steps:

1 – All the requests, previously registered and checked, were sorted out by computer, match by match, into separate categories.

2 – The draw computer programme then gave a separate order number to each request, in a random manner, match by match. These order numbers were entirely unrelated to the registration date, and thus all requests were put on an equal footing.

3 – All the requests for the same match were then classified in order of the numbers allocated to them. This was carried out for each of the 9 matches.

4 – The reservation requests were processed according to this classification within the limits of seats available for each match and for each category.

Written confirmation for all requests made

Before the end of December a letter of confirmation will be sent out to all those whose names were picked in the draw. The letter will include details of seats, the amount to be invoiced and the date on which payment is to be settled at the beginning of 1998.

Another letter will be sent out between now and March 1998 to all those who are to be allocated the remaining 37,000 tickets as they become available.

As of today, all those who made ticket requests can find out the results of the draw on Minitel (3615 FRANCE 98) or Audiotel (08 36 68 22 24). By quoting their draw participation number, which they will have received when the ticket request was made, all candidates will be able to find out whether their request/requests have been successful or not.

The CFO’s technological Partners rally round

The draw was set up with a technical programme devised by EDS, Electronic Data Systems, a CFO Partner since 1995.

EDS, the world No. 1 in the realm of IT services, deployed its considerable arsenal of technical skill so that the draw for the 9 big World Cup games could be made under conditions of total transparency and security. EDS designed not only the draw computer programme itself, but also the system for registering the ticket requests – which reached 120,000 in a single day on 18 October!

Not to be outdone, Sybase, the world leader in database software, supplied the two databases for stocking the ticket requests, along with the software for the processing programme developed by EDS.

Hewlett Packard for their part provided the necessary servers and computers.

And, last but not least, France Telecom, which houses the FRANCE 98 Minitel and Audiotel services, also rallied round to set up a system for communicating the results of the Draw.

Demand for tickets

For one month, between 18 September and 18 October 1997, the general public resident in France were able to request tickets for the nine big World Cup games.

This third phase in ticketing proved to be sensationally popular with the public, with no less than 1,042,272 requests for tickets being made over the inscription period.

Requests were as follows:

Opening Match	St Denis	135,540	13.0%
Quarter-final	St Denis	166,319	16.0%
Quarter-final	Nantes	48,240	4.6%
Quarter-final	Lyon	58,675	5.6%
Quarter-final	Marseille	57,600	5.5%
Semi-final	Marseille	75,212	7.2%
Semi-final	St Denis	182,217	17.5%
3rd place play-off	Paris	72,545	7.0%
Final	St Denis	245,924	23.6%
Total		1,042,272	100%

In terms of seat categories, requests were as follows: 11% for category 1, 21% for category 2, 35% for category 3 and 33% for category 4.

The probability of having your name chosen therefore varied considerably depending on the match and category of ticket.

If you made a request for a Final ticket at the Stade de France in category 3 for example, you had a 1 in 10 chance of being successful, whereas if you requested a category 3 quarter-final ticket in Marseille you had a 1 in 3 chance!

Requests in figures

· Of the 1,042,272 ticket requests, 37% were made by post, 36% by Minitel and 27% by telephone.

· 2 out of 3 requests concerned games at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis. For this stadium, two-thirds of ticket requests were for categories 3 and 4.

· Ticket requests for the World Cup Final made up a quarter of the total number of requests.

· 8% of ticket requests were from buyers of the FRANCE 98 PASS, who had twice as much chance of having their name drawn.

· Banker’s card was the preferred form of payment, with 86% of potential buyers opting for this method.